


Lone Star

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: AU, Age Difference, Domestic Fluff, Fairy Tale Elements, Falling In Love, Fantasy, First Time, M/M, Magical Realism, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 00:38:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3402062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marty’s grip on his gun wavers but comes back quick. “What the fuck?” he says, and doesn’t know if he’s ever asked that question in any purer sense of the phrase. “How the fuck did you—why’s there—why’s there a twelve-foot wide hole in my fucking yard?”</p><p>The man groans and rolls around onto his back, gritting his teeth as his head drops into the soft dirt. He closes his eyes against the sky when he answers. “I fell.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lone Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hartcohle (karategirl448)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hartcohle+%28karategirl448%29).



> This is a criminally late birthday present for the lovely Allie, who has been a dear friend to me this past year and made a whole damn lot of my writing possible. Not only as the best herculean beta I could've asked for, but as a constant source of support and creative inspiration throughout this wild and amazing fic-writing fandom journey, even during the times where I let myself get overwhelmed and lost sight of the bigger, beautiful picture. As the old proverb goes: U DA 1.
> 
> Thanks for helping me find Rust and Marty within myself, girl, so I could try and help them find the stars.

  
  
  
Night yawns wide and settles back on its haunches, cooling the ticking warmth of car hoods and snuffing out porch lights one by one until the neighborhood slips under the lull of sleep. Balmy heat still hangs thick and humid in the air and this has always been Marty’s favorite time of year, a soul born headlong into the dying breath of August fifty-something summers ago.

He’s never held a candle to any sort of saintly patience but he’ll wait for the stillness these nights, waits until most of the world has quieted and gone to bed and he has nobody but the crickets for company before he slides open the back door and steps outside. He drags a deck chair off the porch and sets up on the lawn near the blooming crepe myrtle, nestles one sweating beer next to him in the grass, cracks the top off another and leans back to get a good hard look at it all.

The Louisiana sky stretches out in wide ribbon, black velvet pinpricked with a paltry handful of stars. The brightest among them are faint at best, only barely ever managing to cut through the burn and glow of the city, though on a clear night and with a bit of luck, sometimes he’ll manage to catch a white-hot pinch of blue diamond shining just off to the west.

As far as shit in the sky goes, Marty reckons that one’s probably his favorite.

He never was much of an astronomy buff. Not when he was screwing Marianne Bowman under the stadium bleachers during the space science unit his junior year of high school, not when he’d sat through a remedial comp class to yank up his grade point average at USL and shuffled through notecards scrawled with _the Hunter, the Queen, the Fox, the Bear._ And so he doesn’t have a name for the star, but he figures it’s an important one, somehow, pretty and bright as it is.

Marty has the time to think about things like that nowadays. Ponder and appreciate shit, maybe, for lack of anything else to do. A man can work honest and cut up around town as much as he likes, but he’s going to have to drag ass back home sooner or later, and Marty’s been walking through his front door into an empty house for a good few years now.

When Maggie’d finally had enough, she’d made damn sure of that.

And if he were any kind of miserable wretch—which he ain’t, but on the off chance he were—, maybe Marty would sit out under the sky and wonder if it wasn’t just one more thing, one more bigger, heavier blanket he’s been damned to sleep under alone.

The night sky weighs down on him like that sometimes if he lets it, pulls like lead weights knotted around his bones, but more often than not that blue star is out and that’s enough, maybe. Some kind of reassurance that shit out there just keeps going on, burning through life on its own steam, none too worried that the closest neighbor is more than a few fleeting lifetimes away.

Marty thinks about making a wish on it for old time’s sake and throws back the last swig of his beer instead. The phone rings in the house, and he’s up out of the lawn chair on creaking joints and headed back inside before he can watch his star flicker once and then go out, like a blue-flamed wick pinched out of the sky.  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Back when he’d worked CID for the state, Maggie’d always been real touchy about taking calls at home, at least in the beginning when she still bothered enough to care. Told him the kind of things he saw at work had no place tiptoeing around corners in the house with the girls so young, and it was funny, maybe, how that’d come to mean him in the end.

Marty only lists his cell number on business cards for the firm these days. He doesn’t think too much about how it stopped mattering a long time ago.

And nobody calls the house phone anymore unless it’s some bullshit survey or special offer or Maggie— _five months since we last talked_ , Marty thinks as he half-jogs into the kitchen, _but maybe Maggie, could be Maggie_ —, so when he picks up at half past eleven he’s not really expecting to hear a rush of whining static and then nothing at all, though considering the lonely fuckup of a life he’s been living, it ain’t too much of a surprise, either.

“He—hello?” he tries a second time, louder than the first, and the silence is so thick and airless his voice won’t even reverberate back through the receiver. He goes to hang up but the static cuts back in over a flurry of muffled clicks and then rises into a whirring scream, something so high and shrill it bristles the hair on the back of his neck and makes his skin crawl, and he yanks the phone away from his ear before slamming it back down on the cradle.

Marty makes quick work of bringing the lawn chair and that second beer back inside and trades the stars in the sky for the ones on television instead. Pours himself a glass of tea, wades through work email until nearly one when the infomercials start in strong, and then calls it a night.

He kills the TV and the lights before shuffling down the hall to the bathroom. Comes back out in the dark, stands in front of his bedroom door for a moment, and then walks fast back to the kitchen.

Marty pulls the landline cord out of the phone jack and goes straight to bed.  
  
  
  


At a quarter past three in the morning, there’s a crash.

Marty blinks awake through the dark and reaches for the gun in his bedside table inside the span of a single breath. He thumbs the safety off and pads down the hall to his office at the rear of the house wearing not much more than boxers and an old t-shirt, footsteps muted on the soft carpet. The blinds in the window dither gently in the sill and he parts through them with two fingers, peers bleary-eyed out into the moonlit night and finds it just as empty as he’d left it a few hours before.

He lets the plastic shade snap back into place and blinks, looks down at the gun in his hand and walks out under cover of heavy shadow slanting through the house to stand in front of the sliding glass door. The crepe myrtle tree sways where it’s rooted and the back fence looks untouched, lit up faint by a streetlamp throwing a swathe of gold from the corner.

Marty pushes down the lock on the door and takes the handle, and when he looks back up he sees the crater.

His heart starts hammering like hell but he’s an ex-cop, he’s got a gun he knows how to use and this is his fucking house if anybody got to thinking otherwise, so he throws the glass door back and is off the porch in three long strides, steadying his gun as he comes up slow around the shallow trench from an angle.

The crickets have stopped singing and the night has gone lifeless save for Marty’s bare feet shushing through the damp grass. He gets closer and his heels sink down into fresh-turned dirt warmed up hot as burning beach sand, leaving prints in the soft earth as he steps into a wide, perfect circle scourged barren of living grass.

When a cloud rolls past and moonlight licks across the yard, Marty stops dead.

At the crater’s center, stark naked and making the nerve-fired movements of an animal hit and left to die on the side of the road, is what Marty tells himself is a man. A man, he thinks, because that’s the singular answer inside his realm of possibilities—just a man, only a man, and then that man opens his mouth and rasps out through his teeth, low and grating. “If you’re gonna shoot me, right now would be a good fucking time to do it.”

Marty’s grip on his gun wavers but comes back quick. “What the fuck?” he says, and doesn’t know if he’s ever asked that question in any purer sense of the phrase. “How the fuck did you—why’s there—why’s there a twelve-foot wide hole in my fucking yard?”

The man groans and rolls around onto his back, gritting his teeth as his head drops into the soft dirt. His skin is like smooth milk, so pale it almost glows blue under the moon, but he’s pressing a hand to something that looks scorched black on his left side, breathing deep and ragged through his nose.

He closes his eyes against the sky when he answers. “I fell.”

Marty wraps both hands around his gun and takes two steps closer. “No shit,” he says. “Buck-ass naked in a fucking crater blown into my new sod. What the hell are you doing out here?” He doesn’t falter on his aim but peers around the yard, glances back over both shoulders to make sure they’re alone, and then tries not to let his eyes wander too far when he looks back down again. “This gun holds eight rounds. Now I need some fucking answers, real quick-like, or I’m gonna start with one leg and work my way up.”

“Alright,” the man says around a tight wisp of air, letting his hand fall away from his side. “What you wanna know?”

This time Marty’s arms sag and go slack, broadside of his gun pressed weak against one thigh. The man lays three or four yards away with the left side of his rib cage burned and ripped raw, charred and blackened around three skin-split wounds, but there’s no mistaking the hot red glow shining like infection through the lacerations, so bright Marty can see each of his ribs silhouetted from the inside like an egg embryo held up to the light.

“Jesus,” Marty croaks out, half-shuffling away and stumbling once in the dirt. “Holy—holy _shit._ ”

Some kind of spasm jolts through the man as he sits up enough to study the mess on his side. “Might’ve caught some heat on the way down,” he says, and when his fingers brush burnt skin the red glow pulses and throbs.

Marty reaches up to run a palm over the top of his head, jaw working slapdash on a broken hinge. His gun hangs loose at his side and he’s got a bead of sweat sliding down his back into the elastic waistband of his boxers. Cricket song is just now beginning to thread back into the night and he pinches the soft inside of his wrist hard enough to bruise.

“What the fuck are you?” he asks when he doesn’t wake up, voice not much more than a violent whisper.

“Your fairy fuckin godmother,” the man says, and then coughs ragged, fingers digging down into the dirt. “The hell do you think? You sit out and moon after me near about every chance you get.”

Marty turns, then, to glance toward the west. There’s a naked man lit up like a jack-o’-lantern at his feet and all he can do is soak in the canvas of the night sky, since gone a little dimmer without that bright blue star.

He laughs, high and fast and manic, and turns down to peer back down at the stranger. “Alright buddy,” he says. “This is real elaborate and all, so props for creativity, but I’m done playing. You stay put right here, maybe tell your camera crew to fuck off, and I’m fixing to make a phone call. I’m sure the boys down at the station will be tickled to death when they hear I got a fucking star crash-landed in my back yard.”

“That right there is humanity’s abuse of technological innovation to the point of self-made ignorance,” the stranger says, and rolls over onto his uninjured side with a low groan. “In another life I’d be an omen dropped by a wrathful god, a signifier of plague and end times since reduced to a fucking ploy for late night television.”

“The fuck are you even saying?” Marty asks, drawing his gun back up. “Don’t you move—stay right there. I’m gonna make that phone call and if this ain’t any kind of joke, we’re gonna find you a nice padded cell somewhere where you don’t end tipping over naked in big holes no more.”

“I’m gone, man,” the stranger says, getting his knees up underneath him with a tightly-wound grimace. “I’m skating. Just let me get out of this fucking hole—”

He looks fire-eyed and determined until he plants one of his feet in the dirt and tries to stand, but the weight crumples beneath him before he even rises halfway and he’s falling back to earth with a string of weak curses, right ankle throbbing an angry, burning red like an old-fashioned stove burner. The wound in his side is oozing now, something wet and wine-dark under the moonlight, and he doesn’t try to get back up again.

“Oh shit,” Marty hisses, sliding with heavy-heeled, staggered steps down into the crater. The hole isn’t so deep as it is wide but the dirt is so hot near the center that it almost burns his bare feet, and he stoops close to the man, not touching him but hovering as he thumbs the safety back on his gun. “Hey, hey—hey man, fuck, I can’t have you going belly-up in my yard, that ain’t gonna look good for either of us.”

He reaches out, tentative, and touches one naked shoulder while the man pants fast and shallow through his teeth like he’s trying not to be sick. He’s so hot with something like fever that Marty feels like he needs to start sweating for the both of them.

“Look, we gotta get you out of the dirt,” Marty says. “Just—shit, don’t try and pull anything fast, alright? I’m gonna take you inside and try to get a better look at this fucking mess you got going on. Keep—keep breathing, in and out, okay. That’s it, there you go.”

The man doesn’t fight him and doesn’t say anything, only digs his fingers into Marty’s shoulder like claws when they get him up on one leg, and Marty tries not to think about the warm wetness seeping into his shirt as they struggle and stumble up into the yard, or the red glow still thrumming where their sides press together, hoping to high holy heaven none of the neighbors happen to look out the window and see him carrying a naked man over the threshold into his house.  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


“I gotta call 911,” Marty says a little while later, kneeling on the kitchen floor with his breath rattling hard as he presses a damp cloth to the man’s side. The red glow has faded out and away enough to ignore but blood runs dark in its place. “This shit is so fucked. Looks like you took three slugs and then got doused in fire.”

Slumped over on the cool tile, the man lies very still, glassy blue eyes following Marty’s every breath and movement. He’s none too ashamed of his nakedness and hasn’t bothered to cover himself up, and Marty’s about ready to grab another dishtowel and throw it over his crotch because what in the blue-based fuck, but he figures running blood is a little more pressing than another man’s dick in the long run, and if anybody asks, he was too preoccupied trying to save a fucking life.

“No cops,” the man says with the line of his throat working fast. “I’m fine. They don’t got any business with me.”

Marty snorts at that, pulling the cloth away to inspect the dark stain steeped into the white. “Yeah, okay, you’re fine,” he says, and shakes his head. “But hell, maybe you’re right—maybe the F-B-fuckin’-I would be better suited for this. Mulder and Scully can come out here and poke around in the goddamn crater in my back yard.”

“Who?” the man asks, gritting his teeth as Marty leans in to put more pressure on his side and urges him to bring his own hand up to hold the cloth in place.

“Where the hell are you even from?” Marty mumbles, rising on popping joints to find his cell phone where it rests on the counter next to his gun. “That ain’t bleeding so bad anymore but I’m calling in anyhow. You need to get, uh—looked over. Thoroughly.”

“You ain’t gonna call,” the man rasps from the floor, and the way he says it makes Marty stop dead, cell phone left untouched on the countertop. “What would you tell them? That the human manifestation of a celestial body landed just off your back porch, and he needs emergency medical attention because his insides are lit up? You won’t. You’d sound bug-fuck crazy and you know it.”

Marty watches him for a moment, jaw squared and set tight. “I don’t know about any of that,” he says. “I don’t know you, I don’t know what happened, I still don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about. But if you don’t go to the hospital then what the hell do you suggest I do?”

“I ain’t dying,” the man says on exhale, dropping the cloth in his hand away from his side. “If the fall didn’t kill me, I don’t figure much of anything will.”

“Oh, Christ,” Marty says, slapping a hand on the counter. “What then? You’re just gonna stay here, camp out? Because if you think that’s happening, slick, you got another thing com—”

He stops short, because the man’s chest cavity is glowing bright enough now to show up under the kitchen lights. The bleeding has slowed and begun to dry thick and sticky up around his ribs, but the skin is still seared raw and gouged down to the wet pink. When the stranger brings one hand up again he braces his fingers around the wounds, holds them there, and the spots where his fingertips meet flesh glow a bright, pure white for a handful of seconds before fading and fizzling out like they’d never been there at all, the burns and tears left the same as they were before.

“No fucking good,” he sighs, as if he’d tried to write with a dried-out ink pen and found it empty. “I’m tapped.”

“Jesus fuckin—what—what _are_ you?” Marty asks again, hating the tremor threaded through his voice, and the man looks up at him under sleepy and fatigue-heavy lids. There’s a curl of hair fallen against his temple, plastered damp with sweat, but he doesn’t make any move to brush it away.

“You’ve already said it yourself,” he says, blinking slow. “Don’t think it’s worth repeating a third time tonight.”

It’s around four in the morning but Marty picks up his cell phone and scrolls through until he finds a number he used to know by heart, the task made a little harder by his shaking hands.

He can feel blue eyes boring into him from the floor. “Maybe try 411 instead of 911.”

“If you’re a goddamn star, how the fuck do you even know what 411 is and not Dana Scully?”

“I ain’t totally blind, sitting up there with nothing fucking better to do,” the man says, and Marty bites down on the inside of his cheek and swallows the urge to scream.

“Maggie?” he says when she picks up on the second-to-last ring. “Thank God. Listen—no, I’m fine, I’m okay—look, I’m real sorry to bother you like this, but I really need your help.”

  
  
  


The bathroom door is open next to Marty where he’s propped back against the hallway wall, listening to water drizzle steady into the tub. His phone and gun are on the carpet between his spread legs and he stares straight ahead at the whitewashed drywall, trying not to drift off to the sound of running water.

He’d not only had to help the man hobble down the hall on that bad ankle—twisted or sprained, one of the two, with putting any real weight on it out of the question—, but then stopper up the tub and help him in, still naked as anything sprung up from the earth. He’d sat there looking like a lost puppy, blinking furiously in the brightness of the bathroom, before Marty finally leaned forward to twist on the faucet and get the hot water going.

“Clean yourself up best you can,” he’d said, throwing a clean washcloth down into the filling bath by the man’s knobby knees. “I’m gonna try and dress up your side like Maggie said when you get out, but I’ll be damned if I bathe a full-grown man.”

He tells himself the flush that had crawled up his neck when he’d straightened and walked out of the bathroom was more to do with dragging a six-foot mass of lean muscle and bone through the house than any stretch of bare skin, promptly cuts any related thoughts free and lets them float off and away untethered.

Marty reckons any other sane man in this situation would be freaking the fuck out right now. Almost says as much, but when he opens his mouth what comes out instead is, “What you got for a name?”

Water sloshes idly around in the tub, accompanied by a short length of silence before that low, drawling voice is cutting in over the faucet. “Aerugo.”

“A-roo-goh.” Marty makes a sour-pinched face the other man can’t see. “What the hell is that?”

“My name, asshole.”

“Well shit, I hadn’t gathered as much. Meaning what, exactly?”

“It’s Latin for a form of metallic corrosion, especially the kind of patina that blights copper or brass.” There’s the sound of another foot or hand being drawn through the water, the low thud of a knee hitting the ceramic. “I was apparently named for my blue brightness.”

“You mean like the green shit on an old penny? Ain’t that some kind of rust?” Marty snorts. “Don’t tell me you dig that, man. I’ve seen a better suiting name on a two-legged dog called Lucky.”

“That’s an articulate way of putting it,” the voice comes back after a moment, dry as a sun-parched bone. “But then I don’t think I’d ever given any real thought to—liking it or not.”

“Dunno if I can take either of us seriously, calling you something that sounds like a jar of spaghetti sauce.” Marty reaches up to scratch around his jaw, catching sight of a cobweb he’d never noticed before hanging from the air vent in the hallway. “How do you feel about something a little more simple? Like—shit, I don’t know, let’s see. Lincoln, or Pat—” he barks out a laugh “—short for _Patina_.”

“Fuck you,” comes back just loud enough to be heard over the faucet and Marty grins crooked.

“Hell,” he says, spinning his gun on the carpet. “Maybe even something like Rust.”

The water turns off after some extended fiddling and jimmying, and then it’s quiet. “Rust,” the man says eventually, rolling the word around on his tongue and repeating it one more time, pressing it up against his soft palette like a wedge of ripe tangerine.

“You like that?” Marty asks, oddly pleased despite himself, sitting up straighter against the wall and leaning over to peek around the doorjamb. “What’s your last name?”

The man is slumped down against the back of the tub, just his head and shoulders visible above the rim. “Don’t got one,” he says, not quite catching Marty’s eye.

“Alrighty then,” Marty says, climbing to his feet with some ado. He sets his gun and phone next to the sink and then busies himself with digging in the cabinet under the vanity. “Rust it’s gonna be for now, I guess, less you can’t bear to part with Ragu.”

“Don’t figure I have much of a preference,” the man says, but his eyes swivel fast to lock on Marty. “What do I call you?”

Marty fishes the first aid kit out from under the sink and sets it on the edge of the cabinet. “Martin—or Marty, if you want, doesn’t matter to me.”

“Martin,” Rust echoes, two syllables low and honey-thick in his mouth. “Marty.” He blinks and tries again, eyes softening a little as he says the nickname. “Mmm, think I’ve always liked that one more.”

Marty coughs loud and sudden as if to clear his throat. “Are you done getting cleaned up or what?” he asks. “My—uh— _Maggie_ , who’s a nurse, kinda fed me a few tips on what we should do with this deal you got going on here.”

He makes a vague gesture toward Rust’s side but won’t really let his eyes follow. “Dunno if it’ll make much of a difference, considering, but it’s worth the shot to keep you dying from infection.”

“You kinda sweet on this Maggie?” Rust asks, and Marty nearly drops the towel he just pulled off the rack.

“Hell no— _no_ ,” Marty says, grimacing as two hands brace around his forearms and Rust slowly stands from the water. “She’s my ex-wife.”

He laughs a little without much humor and makes quick work of slinging a towel around Rust’s waist, eyes trained square at some point on the tile, careful not to skim the other man’s hips or stomach with his fingers. “Believe me, man, there’s no love left there.”

“You’ve been alone for a long time,” Rust says. It’s not a question, and Marty cuts his eyes up to look at him.

“How would you know the first thing about it?” he snaps, looking away again. He knows he’s condemned himself in that small second alone, now half-tempted to drop the other man back into the water out of spite. “Listen—let’s try and keep the personal shit at bay, alright? You ain’t my fucking psychiatrist.”

“Maybe not,” Rust says, easy enough. “But I know things.”

“Yeah?” Marty says, steering Rust down the hall to the bedroom. “Then do me a favor and keep them to your fucking self.”

  
  


Rust keeps quiet while Marty cleans and swabs antibiotic ointment around the edges of the burns on his side, careful not to touch any of the raw pink. The gouges don’t look as nasty now that the bleeding has stopped, but the edges of skin are still ripped ragged, like something caught Rust around the ribs and flayed up over his side with burning claws.

Marty has his reading glasses settled on the bridge of his nose, gaze slanted down low along with them as he works. Rust’s eyes have slipped shut and now that he’s here front and center there’s no excuse _not_ to look—it’s downright necessary—, so Marty allows himself a glance or two, something cursory, just to see what he’s dealing with.

Sizing up, he tells himself. Making a profile.

Rust looks—young, for lack of a better word, compared to Marty’s fifty-odd years of hard living. He’s slender and wiry-muscled with faint lines around his eyes and mouth that aren’t yet deepened with the latter part of middle age. Clean shaven and well-built, wherever the fuck he came from, with soft brown waves and fine bones, sleepy eyes and smooth, sparsely-haired skin save for the darker thatch below his navel since covered up with a pair of borrowed sweats. And getting a good look at him now, Marty can’t help but think of things like stone statues in overgrown gardens, or, all too distinctly and without warning, a bookmark Maggie used to keep that was painted with a shepherd sleeping in a nest of grass beside a spring lamb, young and curly-haired and stripped down to the waist under the gentle afternoon sun—

He stops. Stops right there and steps outside a room in his head, turns the key in the lock and throws it hard and careless into a dim-lit place where he can’t see where it lands.

It’s like the impact of the thought somehow startles Rust and his eyes open again—but unhurried, unbothered, not doing anything but watching Marty’s hands under the fan of his lashes.

Marty clears his throat and tries not to touch skin where he’s taping down a large square of gauze. “Real fucking weird, how we’re just kinda trusting one another on good credit right now,” he says. “You could kill me; I could just as easily kill you. Ain’t any real reason why I shouldn’t have you handcuffed to the headboard.”

He regrets that almost as soon as the words touch air, and Rust, the bastard, has the gall to crack a smile. It’s not so much of something that tugs at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes fill with sudden light, the humor there bright and unmistakable.

“You wouldn’t kill me,” he says as Marty finishes and begins packing up the first aid kit. “You can’t.”

Marty slants a look at him from the corner of his eye and pushes his glasses up on his head. “The way you’re talking, almost seems like you’re posing a challenge.”

“No,” Rust says. “But it’s a very human thing, to think your whims could have any fucking bearing on my life at all.”

“Yeah, okay,” Marty says, rising to his feet at the bedside. “You got some weird shit going on, man, I’ll give you that, but for the most part you’re still just a dude with a two-year philosophy degree who showed up naked in my back yard.”

“You can keep on telling yourself that,” Rust says. His voice trails out of the bedroom, following Marty like a cool wind down the hall. “If it makes you feel better.”

Marty comes back a minute later with a glass of water and two aspirin, presses both into Rust’s hands and then slides his palms down his thighs for lack of anything else to do with them, standing there rigid by the night table. “Knock those back and try to get some rest,” he says. “Only one bed in the house, so I guess you’re winning it for now by default. Try anything and I’ll shoot you on sight. I’m gonna be out on the couch. We’ll figure this shit out in the morning.”

Rust watches him hit the overhead light and walk out without a word, and Marty takes his gun, his phone, and three tablets of aspirin for himself straight to the sofa. He turns on the TV and the lamp and fully intends to stay awake, doesn’t even make an attempt on stretching out, and then by the second commercial run his head’s lolled back and he’s snoring, dragged under the pull of hard, dreamless sleep.  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


The sun beats hot through the sliding glass door when Marty next opens his eyes, yellow brightness warm and insistent on his face. It’s a couple hours past noon now and he stretches until his back catches and pops, only scarcely beginning to let the night before sharpen into focus before a clatter comes from the bedroom and he’s up off the sofa like a shot.

He remembers he’s forgotten his gun halfway down the hall but doesn’t turn back to get it, only hurdles headlong into the bedroom and finds Rust awake and sitting in the middle of the bed with his good ankle tucked up underneath him, still in nothing but white gauze and a pair of sweatpants slung low around his hips. The contents of Marty’s bedside drawers have been dumped onto the mattress, organized across the blankets in some bizarre pattern of shape and likeness.

Loose change, a broken flashlight pen, a mixed handful of lemon cough drops and peppermints and empty wrappers. There’s a stress ball shaped like an allergy tablet, the pocket-sized Bible some lady pressed into Marty’s hand in a grocery store parking lot five or six summers ago, a book of matches, three unopened condoms, a copy of _The Secret_ , one smooth-polished stone the color of Georgia clay, a bottle of lube, and—naturally, of course, as if his life wasn’t already fucking sad enough already—a magazine full of nudie cheesecake pictures that Rust has spread wide open in his lap, flipping idle through the pages one at a time.

He glances up when he sees Marty in the doorway and then looks back down again, perched like a peaceful monk, loose-limbed and at ease. “These women look awful uncomfortable,” he says, sniffing once, and Marty wonders what would happen if he dropped from an aneurism on the spot.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he croaks. “You can’t just— _rifle_ through another man’s personal shit like you own the fucking place.”

Rust sets the magazine aside and goes straight for the lube bottle. “What the fuck else was I supposed to do?” he asks, squinting at the label and popping the cap off before leaning in to give the top an experimental sniff. “You been asleep for ten hours.”

“Jesus fuckin—put that down!” Marty says, strangled, and only barely keeps from diving toward the bed to smack the lube out of his hand. “God, you could’ve woken me up before you went plundering through half the house.”

“You needed the rest, and this one drawer here doesn’t quite measure up to half the house, I don’t think,” Rust says. He finally sets the bottle aside and makes careful work of easing his ankle toward the floor. “Now help me up, man, I think I gotta take a piss.”

“You _think?”_

“Well I ain’t ever exactly done it before, but there’s a first time for everything. Now c’mon.”

Marty helps Rust ease up off the bed on the bad ankle, swollen and gone a little more purple than he remembers, and guides him slow down the hall to the bathroom. “Never taken a piss,” he scoffs, letting his hands drop away from Rust once he’s deposited him in front of the vanity. “Tell me, what else haven’t you ever done before?”

Rust only stands there looking sideways at the toilet, thumbing idly along the waistband of his borrowed sweatpants. “A lot of things,” he says. “Everything. At least in this form.”

“Right,” Marty says slowly, taking a step back out into the hallway, reaching up to palm the back of his neck. “Okay. Well, the thing is, you can either sit or you can point and shoot. You got options, and I ain’t gonna fucking judge because I ain’t gonna sit here and watch to find out, so just whip your dick out and have at it, man.”

He leans back in quick and pulls the door shut so it latches, blowing out a heavy sigh. There’s rustling on the other side of the door, and a small eternity seems to come and go before the sound of a steady stream hitting the ceramic echoes through the bathroom.

Marty stands there, remembering how Maggie used to keep stickers and candy for Audrey and Macie when they were training out of diapers, and brings two fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose. The stream eventually tapers off and stops and he hears himself ask in a voice he isn’t entirely sure belongs to him, “Are you done?”

“Uh, yeah,” Rust says, muffled. “I reckon.”

The toilet flushes and Marty thanks God for that small miracle alone, raps twice on the doorframe and then opens up an inch. “You decent?” he says, waiting for an affirmative kind of grunt before swinging the door wide. Rust is propped against the sink, fiddling with the drawstring on his sweatpants, yanking and doing a piss-poor job of keeping them up around his hips.

“Make sure you wash your hands when you’re done messing with that,” Marty says, watching as the other man finally fumbles a knot tight enough to keep himself halfway modest. “I’m fucking starving. You think—you think you could stand to eat anything?”

Rust seems to think about it for a moment. He stands at the sink slouched with his spine curved in deep and his gut pushed out, and he’s still so rawboned Marty can feel his stomach gnawing on his spine at the mere sight of him.

“Yeah,” Rust says, watching his hands under the water, letting the stream gather in his cupped palms like a pool of clear, liquid dream. “Yeah, I think I could.”

  
  


It’s 2:30 in the afternoon but Marty figures breakfast is just as good anytime between sunup and sundown, loads the toaster and cracks a couple eggs into a frying pan while Rust tests out two glasses, filled with orange juice and green tea apiece. He brings the rim of one glass to his lips and sticks the tip of his tongue into the yellow-orange, edges of his eyes tightening up for a second when the sour hits his taste buds. The process is repeated with the tea and Marty thinks Rust’s going to retch and spit it back into the glass, but he only swallows thickly, sets it down with a clink and says, “Fuck if that don’t taste like ass.”

Marty nearly drops the plate of toast in his hand but manages to make it to the table with a butter dish and a jar of peach preserves, his expression kept mostly straight. “How the fuck you know what ass tastes like?”

“I can imagine, drinking that shit,” Rust says, and picks the orange juice back up. He eyeballs the toast and even from over by the stove Marty can hear the man’s stomach twisting up with rumbling growls.

“Go on and eat a piece,” he says, pushing eggs around the skillet with a spatula. “Butter and jam’s there on the table.”

He gets busy with cracking and scrambling another two eggs, has to fish a couple flakes of shell from the bowl, and when he turns back around there’s one plain piece of toast with a bite missing and Rust is licking peach preserves off the blade of a butter knife.

“You serious with that shit?” Marty asks. “You’re gonna contaminate the whole fucking jar.”

“Got nothing to contaminate it with,” Rust says, sticking the knife back in to fish another helping out. This time he slaps it on the piece of toast and spreads it on thick with an unsure kind of flourish, but it gets the job done well enough that he only has to lick two or three fingers clean and swipe one glob off the table.

He takes a bite of toast and the kind of warm satisfaction that spreads over his face and through his limbs is almost tangible. “This right here,” he says after swallowing, tapping the side of the preserves with his middle finger. “Is my favorite.”

“Don’t taste like ass, huh?” Marty says as he comes to sit on the opposite side of the kitchen table and pours another glass of green tea.

“No,” Rust says, reaching for his toast again. “More like the sun.”

“The sun,” Marty repeats, shaking pepper onto his eggs a little violently. “The fucking sun.” He peers across the table at Rust and narrows his eyes, pushes the salt and pepper shakers aside with one hand and sits back, looking down the bridge of his nose.

Rust polishes off the last bite of toast and rubs crumbs off the pads of his fingers before bringing one thumb up to his mouth. He licks a smear of buttery peach away and then catches Marty’s eye, blinking slow and deliberate. “What?”

“So if I ain’t calling the cops—which, by all rights, is exactly what I should’ve done first thing—, what am I gonna do with you? Where are you gonna go?” He makes a harsh noise in the back of his throat and looks out the window over the sink. “Christ, why am I even sitting here acting like it’s my fucking problem?”

Rust spares his ankle a cursory glance where it’s propped under the table and looks back up. “Don’t expect to be going much of anywhere,” he says. “Least not anytime soon. That’ll take a few more days to heal, ‘less I can convince it to hurry up.”

Marty crosses his arms over his chest. “And you just assume you’re staying here in the interim?”

Silence elbows between them for a moment and then Rust is saying, sure and quiet, “Yeah.”

Marty blinks once, twice, and looks down to pick up his fork. He stabs it into an egg and lets the yolk burst and bleed out, gone runny across his plate. “Couple days until that ankle’s on the mend, that’s it, and then you can take your—your light show and get back on the road.” He sniffs but doesn’t look up. “And you ever heard that saying, ‘no good deed goes unpunished’?”

“No.”

“In a nutshell, means don’t make me regret letting you stay under this roof out of the goodness of my own heart.”

“Regret isn’t something humans impart on one another,” Rust says, reaching for another piece of toast, and even after they’re done eating and Marty stands at the sink rinsing dishes while Rust squints hard at the TV with his ankle propped up, he has to sit and wonder what he meant by that.

He figures he knows well enough, considering he didn’t find a reason to ask.  
  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Rust is still slumped over on the couch when Marty walks back out into the kitchen to palm his keys off the counter, elbow tucked close against his bandaged side, settled back against the cushions with his uninjured foot held in one hand. He’s watching the screen with his lips softly parted, eyes narrowed in a sort of transfixed contemplation as a hearty woman with a dark bob whisks egg whites into frothy peaks in a glass mixing bowl.

Marty bounces his key ring on a middle finger and looks between Rust and the television before clearing his throat. “Hey,” he says. “Listen up for a second.”

The other man’s eyes swerve to find him before dropping right down to the keys. “Where are you going?”

“Jesus,” Marty says, “you’re like the old dog I used to have as a kid.” Rust blinks at that and Marty doesn’t bother to explain, looking down to draw invisible lines across the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “So the thing is,” he starts in, “if you plan on staying here while that ankle gets back on the mend, I figure you’re gonna need some supplies. Toothbrush and shit. And some fucking clothes, for Christ’s sake, first and foremost.”

His face scrunches up for a second, lines pulled tight around his eyes. “You’re sure you didn’t leave anything out there in that crater? Wallet, keys, legal identity? That you don’t have, uh—folks anywhere, or nothing?”

“Anything I left up there ain’t gonna do me much good now,” Rust says. “What you see here is what you get.”

“Okay then,” Marty says, pressing his lips into a thin line. “Alright. So some shit to wear and…I don’t know, man. Fuck. What do you want?”

He drags a hand down over the side of his face, for once done more out of real exasperation than any dramatic flourish. “If all this isn’t some huge practical joke, if you’re not a true-blue psych ticket here to kill me in my sleep—then what?” he asks. “What could someone like you possibly want or need from the store?”

Rust runs the edge of a thumbnail along his bottom lip for a second, watching the woman on the television pull a meringue-topped pie from the oven, browned and baked to golden perfection. He drops his hand and looks back up at Marty, features tuned expressionless.

“Beer and cigarettes.”

  
  
  


Almost two hours later, Marty is shouldering back in through the front door with his arms weighed down with plastic bags, swearing softly when something shifts and slides against the sack holding two loaves of sliced bread. He’s balancing a paper bag in the crook of one elbow and kicks the door shut with his heel before dropping the load off on the counter, blowing out a heavy sigh.

Rust is still perched on the sofa, the glass of water and two aspirin Marty left with him untouched. "You buy the whole store?”

“All this ain’t for you,” Marty huffs, clapping his hands against his thighs before going to pull a glass from the dishwasher. He fills it up halfway with ice and tops it off with some tea, taking a swig before moving to paw through the bags.

“Let’s see here,” he says, pulling a box of Swiss Roll cakes out and sliding them across the counter, shortly followed by a few cans of tomato soup. “Got you a toothbrush, couple disposable razors, deodorant, a comb. Already got soap in the shower you can use, hope you ain’t too picky. Toothpaste too.”

Marty glances into the next bag before picking it up and walking into the living room, tossing it down on the couch next to Rust. “Don’t reckon either one of us knows your size, but there’s some stuff to keep you covered up, at least. Undershirts, couple t-shirts, some drawstring pants.”

Rust fishes through the bag and pulls out a plastic-wrapped bundle. “Fruit of the Loom?”

“Uh—yeah man, you need underwear,” Marty says, scratching a nonexistent itch along his jaw before he turns away and goes back to unloading groceries. “Just some briefs, figured that’d be a good place to start.” He stows a jar of pickles and some mayonnaise in the fridge and wads up a few empty plastic bags to stuff them in an empty tissue box. “You can try it all on later, and then maybe we can figure out what size—hey hey hey, not in here!”

Rust already has one leg pulled free from Marty’s borrowed sweatpants and the other side yanked down around his thigh. His arms freeze at the outburst before falling into his naked lap. “What?”

“Don’t be gettin’ naked in the living room,” Marty says, rushing over to snap the blinds shut. “In fact, don’t be getting naked at all unless you’re in the bathroom with the goddamn door shut.”

He turns away without lingering on Rust and walks fast back to the kitchen, pawing messy through bags like a bear. “Listen—guys don’t do that around one another. People’ll start getting weird ideas, you walk around doing that shit.”

“Doing what shit?” Rust asks, making no move to cover himself. “Be naked?” His mouth tightens up for a second before he reaches for the pack of underwear, and he couldn’t hardly flush the toilet earlier but Marty’s never seen a man rip into a plastic bag so neatly in his life.

“I thought humans didn’t have any problem doing that, least around people they felt comfortable with,” Rust says, kicking the rest of the sweatpants off before shaking open a pair of navy briefs.

Marty drops the styrofoam tray of hamburger meat in his hand and only barely catches it before it slides off the counter onto the floor. “What?”

“Don’t see how it’s a big deal.” Rust gets both legs into the briefs before pulling them up over his thighs, rising a little until the elastic snaps low around his waist. “You got the same parts, I’m assuming.”

“Well, yeah,” Marty stutters, already flushing hot pink. “But that don’t mean—listen, that’s what makes it—”

Rust crow-hops and limps across the living room until he’s standing at the counter, half-winded but peering straight down into the brown paper bag. He reaches inside and palms the pack of cigarettes before pulling out a sixer of tall boys, setting them down with an aluminum _thunk_.

Marty closes his eyes and shakes his head, face screwed up like a silent martyr enduring some great pain. “What the fuck am I doing right now?” he says. “What the fucking fuck.”

“Would you look at that,” Rust drawls, like he hadn’t even heard him, the tiniest little smile pulling at the corner of his mouth as he thumps the five-point shape on the can. “Lone Star.”  
  


★ ★ ★  
  
  


That first afternoon drags on for a small eternity, and in moments where Marty isn’t busy watching Rust from the corner of his eye, he’s hard-pressed into feeling like he should be.

The sleepy-eyed man pauses his channel surfing—after having figured the entire remote control out in about a minute flat—on trash reality shows full of more censor beeps than dialogue, eats his way through a Swiss Roll cake in a series of savored, lingering bites and then licks the wrapper clean, learns the horror of drinking orange juice after brushing his teeth, and finally pulls on a plain white undershirt that fits him better than anything that came out of a fucking prepackaged bag from Walmart has any decent right to.

While the beer’s chilling in the fridge Rust takes a seat in front of the open sliding glass door, lights up his first cigarette with a cheap lighter fished out of the junk drawer and sucks about a fourth of it down in one go. He holds the drag like it’s his dying breath before finally coughing harsh and ragged, and Marty nearly throws his laptop and a stack of case files across the room when the smoke bursts back into the air filled with tiny motes of incandescent dust.

Rust only taps ash into a coffee cup between his thighs and watches the glitter disperse through the room, shining like a handful of powdered diamond tossed into the afternoon sunlight. “My bad,” he says, wincing a little as he takes another drag. “Guess that first one gets everybody.”

Marty makes it out to be a chore, checking the wounds on his side, and grumbles and bustles around Rust with the first aid kit until he sits back and pulls his shirt up, exposing the makeshift bandaging taped over his ribs.

When the dressing is pulled back they find the skin just as burnt and shiny-raw as it was the night before, still scraped down deep in three hot spots that have oozed out a lurid yellow into the white gauze. Blood has pooled in mottled bruises under his skin, deep plum washed like wine watercolor over his ribcage, but the angry red glow from before is long since gone.

“Fuck,” Rust says, and Marty’s reminded of the quietly disappointed acceptance of another week gone by with a losing lottery ticket. “This is gonna take longer than I thought.”

“Never got a straight answer out of you, how this happened,” Marty says, cleaning around the wounds with a cotton ball and some warm water. “Damndest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Rust sighs softly and throws his eyes toward the floor. “They tried to catch me when I fell,” he says.

“Who did?”

“The others.”

Marty looks pointed up over the rims of his reading glasses, still wiping around scraped skin. “Okay, well some fucking context would be nice.”

“My brothers and sisters,” Rust says, as if that’s any better. “Reached out and snagged me on the way down.”

There’s a piece of fuzz stuck to the side of the antiseptic ointment that Marty pulls away before unscrewing the lid. “Couldn’t catch a falling star, huh?” he says dry and offhand, partway distracted, squeezing a bit of cream onto a cotton swab and daubing it onto Rust’s side.

“Guess not,” Rust says, quiet. “But then I don’t figure some falling things are meant to be caught.”

Marty accidentally scrapes the cotton swab across some of the raw pink and Rust hisses through his teeth but stands for it, anchoring his hands around his knees. “Sometimes,” he says when Marty goes back to his doctoring, “we fall for a reason.”

Plastic crinkles through the quiet as Marty unwraps another few squares of gauze. “How’s that?”

“Different things,” Rust tells him, and the way he says it with the line of his throat working, Marty figures that’s about as much as he’s gonna get. “You don’t really know until you get down here. But it’d be in my best interest to figure it out sooner than later.”

Marty starts taping a clean bandage over Rust’s side, fingers smoothing down the edges of tape one at a time. He doesn’t look up again until the job’s done. “You got some kinda quota you need to hit?”

“I guess you could say that,” Rust says. “Thing is—you don’t fulfill that purpose, you burn out and die.”

“Sounds a lot like life in general,” Marty says, digging around in the first aid kit until he comes back up with a roll of nylon bandage. He sighs and gestures for Rust to swing his ankle up to settle on the couch.

“Probably,” Rust says, held perfectly still while Marty’s fingers brace up around his heel. “Death comes for everything, if you give it enough time.”

Marty snorts. “Real nice world outlook you got there, man.”

Rust only blinks and leans back further against the cushions, watching the other man slowly wind and wrap away bruised and swollen skin. “I’ve seen more singular deaths than there are grains of sand on this earth,” he says. “It’s not a matter of perspective. Death is something infinite—beyond you and me.”

“You ever think about narrating one of them freakish science documentaries?” Marty asks, securing the bandage and standing from the couch. “And tell me, o wise one,” he says, packing the first aid kit back up, “if you’ve got death’s personal number, how is it you can’t figure out what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing down here?”

“Well,” Rust says, following Marty’s retreating back as he pads toward the kitchen. “I mean, I landed in your fuckin yard.”

The faucet starts up full-blast as Marty barks out a laugh, soaping his hands until they’re lathered foamy white. “Yeah, and if I wanted a goddamn crater blown in my new sod, I could’ve hired somebody with a backhoe.”

“Collateral damage,” Rust says, watching Marty dip his hands under the water. “If I ended up here, it’s likely because you needed me in some capacity. There must’ve been a reason.”

Marty slaps the faucet off and yanks a dishtowel off the counter to dry his hands, shaking his head from behind the kitchen bar. “Hate to break it to you, pal,” he says, “but you're the one that looks like you need help.”

“Not me,” he says a moment later while Rust sits silent, pulling a jar of pasta sauce from the pantry and turning away to set a pot on the stove. “Somebody else out there can be your pet project. I’m just fine.”  
  
  
  


Rust wins the bedroom again that night, sitting propped up against a couple pillows with a pile of old books next to him in the blankets. Marty hadn’t even bothered to ask how he knew to fucking read but couldn’t butter toast without three small acts of God, just toted in a water-stained box from the garage full of whatever books he’d taken with him after the divorce and let Rust have at it.

He picks an old textbook manual on investigative fieldwork, a how-to guide for handmade fishing lures that Marty has maybe only cracked open twice in his life, and a used and abused copy of _The Outsiders_ , which—three decades after the English class it was stolen from—had nearly fallen apart in Rust’s hands when he first picked it up.

“You need anything else? Warm towels, mints on the pillow?” Marty asks, standing in the doorway of his own bedroom, suddenly an outsider looking in. “Feel like I’m running a full turndown service here.”

Rust shifts around under the sheet, gently smoothing over creases with his hands. “No,” he says, eyes hidden somewhere under his lashes. And then, “Thanks, Marty. For helping me out.”

It’s an oddly-tilted moment, where they watch one another through the yellow lamplight, and it occurs to Marty that they hardly know one another from Adam, that all this has unfolded like an everlasting dream and that he hasn’t said the other man’s name one time since the night before, choosing to just start talking in his direction rather than address him and hoping the intent came across loud and clear.

“Sure thing,” is what he says, rapping his knuckles on the doorjamb, and walks back down the hall to bed down on the couch. “Call it my karmic contribution of the year.”  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


The next morning, Rust sits all through breakfast periodically reaching up to touch his face, scratching fingers through the stubble along his chin and jaw with a strained sort of expression pulling around his eyes and mouth.

Marty gives him about five minutes, then looks up over the morning paper and pulls his reading glasses off his face. “What are you fucking doing?”

“Not used to this,” Rust says, rubbing the coarse bristles on his cheek, light but faintly visible in the sun slanting through the window. “Don’t much care for it.”

“Then _shave_ ,” Marty says, eyebrows high on his forehead. “Couple razors under the bathroom sink with your name written all over them.”

He holds the paper back up but can feel Rust’s eyes on him through the sports section, all but burning a hole in the newsprint. There’s an empty stretch of quiet filled with the sound of the washing machine running in the other room, and then Rust’s chair is scraping back on the kitchen floor and Marty hears him limp heavily down the hall toward the bathroom.

“Shaving cream’s in the red and white can,” Marty says, lowering the newspaper to get a hand around his cup of coffee. “And don’t leave a mess in the fuckin sink, you gotta rinse that shit out when you’re done.”  
  
  


In front of the bathroom mirror, Rust stands in a pair of low-slung sweatpants and his undershirt, fabric thin enough to see the thick white bandage taped up around his ribs. He has a safety razor in one hand and a can of Barbasol in the other, the water running steady, and a stubble-rough jaw he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with.

He watches himself in the mirror while the water drizzles in a piddling sort of trance, studying the shape of his nose, the downward slant pulling slight on the corners of his eyes, the small, soft bow of his mouth. It’s all foreign and distantly familiar—something he’d always known and never quite seen—but altogether it’s overwhelming, too much at one time, and he leans in close over the sink until his forehead is touching the glass and all he can see are the irises of his eyes swimming in pools of white.

Rust looks, and it’s almost as if dulled pinches of blue diamond light look back.

When he finally pushes the tab on the can, the shaving cream comes out in a dollop not too much unlike the egg whites the woman on the cooking show whipped together the morning before, thickly rich and peaked. Rust brings it up to his nose, breathes down the smell of clean white and fights the pressing urge to lick it from the palm of his hand.

It goes on smooth over his face like a fresh blanket of wet snow, and as he drags the first stroke of the razor he hisses and flinches back hard, watching in the mirror as the white blooms with a swirling streak of vibrant red.

The blood wells fast and drips down his jaw, falling in tiny spatters into the ivory sink, and he watches it for a moment before bringing two fingertips up to press against the crimson and white, mixing into soft frothy pink between his thumb and forefinger.

Marty chooses that moment to walk down the hall, and when he breezes past the open door he throws his heel down like a break and spits out a low curse, making Rust drop the razor into the blood-spotted sink with a metal clatter.

“What’re you doing?” Marty half-shouts, rushing into the bathroom to yank a wad of toilet paper off the roll. “Jesus Christ, you’re bleeding all over the fucking place.”

He presses the toilet paper up over the cut along Rust’s jaw and holds it there while the other man’s eyes blink back in vague bewilderment, reaching up to brush Marty’s elbow with one hand.

“I—I didn’t mean to,” Rust says, staggering a little under the weight of Marty’s hand. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“No shit it wasn’t supposed to happen, you’ve sliced yourself wide open,” Marty says, pulling the toilet paper back to inspect the cut. “You telling me you’ve never fucking shaved before, either?”

“Never had any reason to,” Rust says, watching Marty lean over to knock the toilet seat down, and then lets himself be pushed into sitting on the closed lid. He eyeballs the red spattered in the sink and presses his lips into a thin line, reaching up to hold the wad of tissue in place when the other man’s hand drops away.

Marty cups water in his hands and splashes it up around the ceramic, trying to wash the blood down the drain. “Well it’s something you’re gonna have to learn,” he says, cutting his eyes back to Rust. “That stopped bleeding yet?”

Rust pulls the toilet paper away and considers it in the palm of his hand. “Like cardinal feathers on fresh snow,” he says, subdued, and Marty blinks before he snorts out a laugh.

“Alright Robert Frost, shut up and pay attention because we’re fixing to have a lesson.” He squirts another dollop of shaving cream into Rust’s hand and motions for him to lather back up, palms the razor from the sink and promptly stalls out mid-air, gone rigid like an animatronic character whose plug got yanked out of the socket.

“Uh,” he says after a few beats of silence, not quite meeting blue eyes burning bright and heavy. “How you think we should do this? You wanna follow my lead, or—or should I—?”

“Reckon I’m a pretty quick study with a demo,” Rust says, like they’re talking about light switches or engine blocks. “You show me, and I’ll pick it up for next time.”

“Right,” Marty says, clearing his throat as he steps closer to the vanity. “Okay, just—stand up here in front of the mirror, and get your razor in hand—yep, there you go.”

He turns the faucet on low and pulls the stop, gestures for Rust to wet the razor and then mimes shaving over his jaw, standing next to the other man in the mirror while he mimics the movement. It goes agonizingly slow, and by the third stroke-and-rinse Marty’s drumming his fingers on the counter and trying not to chew through his own cheek.

“When they say ‘the art of shaving,’ you aren’t supposed to take that shit literally,” he says, and then reaches up to brace his hand over Rust’s so his fingers are balanced on the handle, moving with quicker and more efficient strokes. “One two rinse, one two rinse—Christ, you still gotta do your neck.”

Rust meets Marty’s eyes in the mirror. “My neck.”

“Yeah your fucking neck, unless you wanna look homeless. Now sit back down on the toilet and be still, this’s the worst place to get nicked.”

He pulls the razor out of Rust’s hand and doesn’t bother with secondhand instruction anymore, just tips his chin up with two fingers and makes careful work of shaving around the line of his throat, and when he reaches up to gently press a steadying thumb at the base of the dipped hollow there Rust swallows fast and makes a little noise—tiny, tiny, so fucking tiny Marty thinks he might’ve imagined it.

But then Rust is humming soft, skin all smooth and balmy from the hot water and lather. “You’ve got warm hands,” he says, quiet, and Marty only barely manages to follow through with the last couple strokes before he’s letting the razor drop into the sink and walking out of the bathroom, leaving Rust sitting there blinking in his wake.  
  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


There are things men talk about, and there are things they don’t.

This late in life, Marty figures he’s got a pretty solid grasp on his guiding lines and personal definitions, managed to catch hold of the reigns and hold on for the long ride out. There might’ve been some mishaps along the way once or twice, a couple nails in the road, but he knows the fucking code, at least, on how a man is supposed to act.

Rust does not.

He touches Marty. Three fingers brushing an elbow in the living room, stopping him with a hand low on his side in the hall to ask if he’s ever been to Alaska and seen the lights, ever eaten a deep-fried twinkie, ever dreamed in black and white, ever watched a dormouse climb a blackberry bush without getting thistles in her paws. Sits at the kitchen table eating grits that may as well be gravel in his mouth for the faces he’s been making, watching Marty’s hands through his lashes as he slices strawberries and nectarines into a glass bowl, eyes trained on a drop of pink juice that slides down his palm to bead on the soft inner part of his wrist.

He prefers the texture of soft cotton over blended acrylic, has said as much twice on two separate occasions, and in idle moments draws patterns on the brown suede of Marty’s couch with a fingertip, smoothing his palm over the fabric to wipe away spirals and stars and strange shapes Marty’s never seen before. Moans outright the first time he tries butter pecan ice cream, holds eye contact while they’re talking until Marty feels like he’s going to burst out of his own skin, swigs coffee straight from Marty’s favorite mug without a thought, and late one night has HBO running on a program that—as Marty discovers when he walks back into the room from his office—for all intents and purposes, looks like the kind of vanilla-sweet porn single women probably watch in their pajamas, complete with satin sheets and goddamn bonafide mood lighting.

Marty stops short by the recliner and blinks at the TV on the wall, where a tawny-haired man is laying between the long legs of a woman with skin like caramel, kissing soft up her stomach and bare chest to take a nipple in his mouth. Rust is watching the screen with a thread of tightness pulled between his eyes, backs of two fingers come up to rest lightly against his lips, and doesn’t move beyond blinking when Marty walks in.

“They’re beautiful in their differences,” Rust says, before Marty can hardly open his mouth to protest. “There was a time, I remember, where you humans made love without bothering to give a fuck about the color spectrum. It’ll come back around again, you wait long enough.”

“Don’t _say_ that,” Marty murmurs, flustered, unable to look at either the TV or Rust. “What—Jesus man, why are you even watching this? In my fucking living room.”

“Don’t say what?” Rust asks, turning to look at him, hand dropping away from his mouth. On the screen the man is reaching down between the woman’s legs and she’s making a profane kind of sound high in her throat. “That the future’s gonna be a more progressive place for mankind?”

“No, Christ—never mind. Just turn this shit off.”

“What is it I’m not supposed to say, then?” Rust doesn’t make any move to change the channel, but his eyes are gleaming with a new shade of light. “Make love?”

“Yes,” Marty says, half-strangled, and marches over to snatch the remote off the coffee table, only managing to find the sports network by sheer muscle memory. “That.”

“If that’s what they’re doing, I don’t see a fuckin reason to call it by any other name,” Rust says, but Marty’s already slamming cabinets in the kitchen, wondering if sticking his head in the freezer would cool the flush burning clear down to his chest any faster.  
  
  
  
  


On Sunday evening the weekend begins to wane and die, and Marty knows he has to be at the office bright and early for a follow-up meeting with a client. Knows Rust’s ankle has gotten back on the mend faster than should’ve been possible, strong enough now to at least keep him upright when he bears weight on it, and while the other man starts up the shower down the hall he picks up the phone, orders a pretty generous sampling of takeout, and thinks hard about what the fuck he’s gonna do come Monday.

The Chinese food place is only about ten minutes down the road but the mere thought of leaving Rust alone in the house makes Marty get uneasy, just enough to make him sweat, and at half past six the shower finally cuts out and the doorbell rings for delivery.

Marty snags his wallet off the counter on the way to the front door and swings it open to greet the kid in a backwards baseball cap holding two paper bags and a yellow receipt.

“Mister…Hart?” he asks, holding out the receipt and pulling a pen from behind his ear. “We got beef and broccoli, sweet and sour pork, house lo mein, wonton soup?”

“Yep, that’s me,” Marty says, taking the receipt to scribble something that might be his name against his thigh, and when he looks back up the delivery kid’s eyes have gone wide, staring straight over Marty’s shoulder into the house behind him.

Marty blinks at him and then turns, slow, slow, like maybe the slower he goes the less real it’d all have to be—but no, Rust is standing a few feet behind him in direct sight of the door, flush naked save for his taped-up side and the jar of peach preserves in hand, idly licking around the back of a silver tablespoon.

“What’s all that?” he asks, still pink and damp from the shower, and Marty turns back to face outside and pulls the bags out of the delivery kid’s hands, thrusts the receipt and the first few bills he fishes out of his wallet forward with no concern as to where they end up, grins hard enough to crack a tooth and steps back in the foyer.

“Sorry about that, he’s not really all there in the head,” he says, and knees the door shut hard enough that the flat screen rattles on the wall.

Rust scoops another helping of marmalade out of the jar and brings it up to his mouth. “He looked a little pale,” he says, watching as Marty slides the takeout across the counter and rounds on him. “Forgot to mention, you’re out of towels.”

“But are you out of fucking _clothes?”_ Marty snaps, pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead, half-expecting a sitcom laugh track to start jeering around them. “What’d I say about walking around naked?”

“Well shit,” Rust says, shifting his weight around heavy onto one hip. “I know what you said, but does that make it the fuckin law? Not like you ain’t seen it all before anyhow.”

He keeps standing there, all wet curls and apricot-soft skin tinged with a little more color since the night he showed up in the back yard, and Marty closes his eyes, palms the back of his neck and breathes out a sigh until his lungs begin to burn.

“Come back here for a minute,” he says, leading the way down the hall toward the bedroom. “Got something for you to put on.”

Five minutes later, Rust is settled behind a TV tray with Marty’s blue bathrobe sashed around his waist, something so old and dryer-spun there’s nothing left written on the inside tag anymore. He’s steadily working his way through a cup of wonton soup and acting like it’s maybe the best thing he’s ever tasted since peach marmalade, pleased as punch in that slow-blinking, sleepy-eyed way of his.

“You comfortable enough now?” Marty asks, stabbing at lo mein in his takeout box. “No more of this nudist colony shit?”

“For it to be a colony, both of us would have to be naked,” Rust says, reaching down to pick his beer up off a coaster on the coffee table. He tips the can back for a swig and then slants Marty a look from the corner of his eye. “As it stands, that ain’t the case.”

“Let me tell you what, Lone Star,” Marty says, half-laughing as he brings a forkful of noodles up to his mouth. “It ain’t ever gonna be the case, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Three days spent on the sofa has Marty’s back starting to take on the preliminary signs of rigor mortis, so on Sunday night he moves Rust out of the bedroom and onto the couch, set up with a pillow and flannel blanket pulled down from the top of the hall closet.

“Reckon you’re healing up quick enough, won’t hurt you to sleep out here for a couple days ‘til you’re on your way,” Marty says, shaking out the blanket and draping it over the cushions. “Younger than me, anyhow. Back can take it just fine.”

Rust drops down onto the sofa, still wrapped up in Marty’s bathrobe, though now he’s got the sash loose with a pair of briefs on underneath. “I’m not any younger than you,” he says. “Least not in years.”

“Oh yeah?” Marty asks, surprising himself a little when he drops down next to Rust on the couch. “Seems to me you don’t look a day over thirty-five.”

“More like thirty five million, give or take a few,” Rust says, pulling at a loose thread on the edge of the robe. He doesn’t snap it off but rolls it between two fingers until it curls in on itself into a loop, then looks up at Marty, features drawn even. “Couple more than say, fifty-three years.”

Marty feels something clench low in the pit of his stomach and the skin on his face tightens the barest little bit. “How did you know that?” he asks, low enough that it almost brushes a whisper. He swallows fast and gains a little bluster back, shaking the prior thought away. “And are you gonna keep on beating this star shtick of yours, because I don’t thi—”

“Told you before,” Rust says, cutting in gently. “I know a lot of things. Comes with the territory. You spend nearly half a million years hanging around up in the fucking sky, you tend to see some shit.”

He regards Marty for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth pulls up on one side, softening his features and the hard blue brightness of his eyes. “See some good things, too.”

“Well I’m gonna have to take a rain check on ‘em for now,” Marty says, back of one hand brushing Rust’s knee as he pushes up off the couch with a grunt, though he keeps on like it hadn’t even happened. “Meant to tell you earlier, I gotta go to work tomorrow.”

“That’s generally what middle-aged people do on Monday mornings,” Rust says, eyes slanted down into his lap. “Not like I won’t keep in the meantime.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Marty says, serious. “You not keeping in the meantime.”

“How’s that?”

Marty holds his hands palm-up and then lets them drop down to slap against his thighs. “I don’t know, man, you’re practically like having a six-foot two-year-old in the house. How am I supposed to know you ain’t gonna stick your finger in a wall outlet or burn the fuckin house down while I’m gone?”

“Well for one, I ain’t that fucking stupid,” Rust says, tipping his head back against the couch. He finds Marty’s eye and holds it there, chest rising and falling easy beneath the open bath robe. “You can trust me.”

Marty has to clear his throat and take a step back, but he nods a little, examining the back of one hand like maybe he could find the answer there. “Y’know, Rust,” he says, and it’s hard, but he doesn’t run, doesn’t break for the mouth of the hall. “Couldn’t really tell you why, and I’ll be damned to hell for it probably, but I guess I do.”

The answering smile that spreads across Rust’s face is so bright, Marty’s almost surprised he doesn’t light up to match.  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


“This place needs some fucking color,” Marty says the next morning at breakfast, swallowing down his last mouthful of coffee. He’s dressed in slacks and an ironed work shirt, tie hanging open at his neck while he looks around the kitchen and living room like they’re old threats dulled by the wear of time.

“Got some paint in the garage I been meaning to crack open, but that’s gonna have to wait for another day,” he says, pushing back from the table and standing. “Gotta head in to work. Turns out not everyone in this house can make out as some kind of cosmic freeloader.”

He starts doing up his tie and tosses a look down at Rust, who is busy pushing a strawberry slice around the edge of his plate with a fork. “So let’s go over this one more time. You ain’t gonna touch anything that doesn’t need to be touched, right?”

Rust doesn’t look up. “Yep.”

“No answering the door.”

“Nope.”

“Especially no answering the door _naked_.”

“Only for you, Marty,” Rust says casually, popping the strawberry into his mouth with two fingers, and Marty spits out a low curse before shuffling out of the kitchen to find his work shoes.

When he goes to leave, Rust gives him a two-fingered wave from where he’s slumped on the couch with Marty’s copy of _The Secret_. “Have a good day at work,” he says, just like that, blinking easy before licking his finger to turn to the next page.

In the driveway, Marty tries to evoke the last memory he has of Maggie saying those words, pressing a kiss to his cheek as he breezed through the kitchen and out the front door, or the girls chorusing it as they sat eating cereal and toaster waffles at the kitchen table before school.

He sits slumped behind the steering wheel of his car for a long minute before he can finally manage to get the key in the ignition and crank it up.

  
  
  


The first client meeting goes over without a hitch. In and out deal with a cheating husband, all in-town, nothing high risk. Marty shakes the woman’s hand and tells her he’ll have it figured by the end of the work week, because god damn if he don’t know the signs of some poor bastard dipping into another man’s honey pot when it slides across his desk in a manila folder.

He takes a handful of calls and does some filing because he does all the filing these days. Fucks around in the online archives until his next client meeting—a follow-up, some residual conflicts come up on the side—, eats a quick lunch, and then gets to thinking on Rust.

Marty knows he’s got friends with favors to spare still working on the force, and he wonders how hard or easy it might be to lift a couple prints off one of Rust’s used glasses and feed it through the database. A thumb and forefinger, maybe part of his palm if things got to be highfalutin, and that’d be more than enough to yank a name up out of the system. The thought strikes him like an epiphany, and it’s almost like he can already see the record printout, typed up in a long list of answers fleshing out the man who had tripped and stumbled into his back yard hard enough to stay there.

He’s picking up his phone to call Bobby Lutz when it lights up and rings in his hand.

“Hey, uh, Marty?” the other end says when he picks up. “It’s Beau Wyatt. Brick house across the street. How you doing?”

“Well hey, Beau,” Marty says, easy enough, but he’s already sitting forward in his chair and bracing a hand on the edge of his desk. “I’ve been at work most of the day. What can I do you for?”

Beau clears his throat and then murmurs something too low for Marty hear away from the phone before his voice comes back in clear. “Well it ain’t anything you can do for me, except the kids have been out there and seen him, but I think we might have to call the authorities if you’re away from the house. See there’s—uh, well there’s a naked man in your yard, kinda just sitting there, but he’s—”

Marty’s heart drops like a lead sinker to the pit of his stomach. “Fuck,” he hisses, scrambling up from his desk and fumbling for his keys. “I’m coming—damn it, just give me twenty minutes and I’ll be there. It’s—shit, _shit,_ he’s younger-looking, yeah? Got light brown hair.”

“Yeah,” Beau says, “but the thing is, he’s got all kinds of fucking critters out there with him—damndest thing I ever saw, Marty, I’ll tell you what. Cathy says we need to get the police out here, so I guess now that you know, I’m gonna go ahead and put in the call. I mean, he ain’t swinging his dick around or nothing but he looks like he could be one of them crazy ones, like some kind of visionary type, drinks a little too much of his own Kool-Aid.”

He pauses for a second, faint static buzzing across the line. “Wait a fucking second—you know this guy?”

“Yes!” Marty gasps, bustling out through the front door and turning to jam his key in the lock. “Wait, no, _no_ —don’t call the cops—listen, Christ, he’s supposed to be there.”

“Supposed to be buck-ass naked in your front yard with half the state wildlife?”

“Damn it, Beau, he ain’t supposed to be naked but he’s—he’s on some kind of medication, got him all fucked up after an accident.” Marty knows he’s halfway lying but the words fly from his mouth a mile a minute, already the truth by the time they hit air. “He ain’t in his right mind right now and doesn’t know what he’s doing, so just let me take care of it when I get there, I’m coming as fast as I can. Tell Cathy and the kids I’m real sorry.”

He ends the call, whips his phone into the passenger seat and drives like white lightning all the way home.

  
  
  


When Marty rounds the corner and turns onto his block, it looks like every woman on the street has gathered into a brood of clucking hens across the way from his house, looking off into the yard with their hands shading their eyes and waving mail like fans in the heat.

He grits his teeth and has to keep himself from skidding on two burning wheels into the driveway, puts the car in park and steps out as calmly as he can manage. That lasts all of about two seconds, because Rust is as naked as a spring jaybird, spread out by the blooming azalea bushes on Marty’s bathrobe like it’s a beach towel, sunning himself with the newspaper folded and brought up in front of his face. There’s a stray cat curled up by his side and a pair of squirrels digging in the yard by his head, tails twitching as they scrabble around in the dirt, none too wary of the—and Marty has to blink, once and again when he first sees it—lanky fox perched on the front walk, sitting vigil over the whole scene.

Rust lowers the newspaper when Marty’s car door slams, making the mockingbird balanced on the edge of the page flit off to light in the bushes where a wild brown rabbit hops out to nibble at the grass. “You’re back early,” he says, squinting up from his spot on the lawn.

“What are you doing?” Marty hisses, already verging on hysterical. “Why the fuck are you outside?”

“Came out to get the paper and forgot the door latched from the inside,” Rust says, drawing one of his legs up, and if wasn’t clear he was naked before it sure as hell is now. “It’s too damn hot to keep that robe on out here.”

“Good God almighty,” Marty rasps. “My neighbors have three kids and you’re out here with your bare ass shining—you’re gonna get put on the sex offender list and you don’t even have a fucking social security card.”

“I don’t need none of that,” Rust says, blinking when Marty steps forward to cast a long shadow over him. “You’re blocking the sun.”

“You bet your white ass I am,” Marty says, edging around the animals with wary eyes to bend and get a hand around Rust’s arm. “Get up, you’re putting on a goddamn spectacle—and what the—what the hell are all these animals doing out here?”

He stares at the fox still sitting on the front walk, a dirty rust-colored brown with black paws and golden yellow eyes. “That’s a real fucking fox. A live one.”

“We’re all made up of the same stuff,” Rust says, reaching down to run a finger along the cat’s back as it gets up to stretch, meowing faintly. “It’s elemental attraction in the raw.”

He lets Marty haul him to his feet, making a sudden noise high in his throat when Marty snatches the newspaper away and slaps it up over his crotch, bath robe be damned. The ladies across the street are staring unabashedly where they stand, most of them gone stone-still, and Rust throws up a hand in greeting before Marty steers him around and—still holding the newspaper against his front—pushes him quickly toward the front door.

“They seem like a nice enough bunch,” Rust says, and when they pass by the fox it merely gets up and trots off into the thin stretch of scrub forest behind the lot next door. “Don’t see what the big occasion was, though.”

“Have you ever looked in the mirror?” Marty grunts, jimmying the lock back open before urging Rust over the threshold. “Christ, even old Mrs. Kaminski was out there in her fucking wheel cha—oh, my God.”

All the furniture has been moved away from the living room walls far enough for a slender body to slip behind, and the can of blue paint that’s been gathering dust in the garage for two years sits open on a layer of newspaper by the coffee table.

The white walls Marty left behind earlier that morning are no longer bare, since painted over with an intricate spider web of stars and swirls and things scrawled in Latin, divvied up into a little splash of the cosmos mapped across his living room like a keyhole in the night sky.

“You like it?” Rust asks, when Marty’s hand drops away and the newspaper hits the floor. “Finally found a fucking use for that pastry brush that’s been sitting in your kitchen drawer for ten years.”

“You did all this by hand?” Marty asks, stepping further into the room. The air is heavy with paint fumes but he sucks in a deep breath anyhow, lightly touching a diamond-shaped star behind the sofa. The lines are so sharp and precise they look like they were stenciled on one by one with a machine. “What the fuck, Rust.”

“All by hand from memory,” Rust says, quiet, and only then seems to become aware of his nakedness, shifting a little awkwardly on his feet. “It’d be easy to cover up, if you don’t like it. I just figured—”

“No,” Marty says, looking around the room with his eyes gone a shade or two brighter. “I’ll have to shoot you if you pull this shit again, but—I like it. Looks good.”

Rust cuts his eyes over to Marty’s. “Yeah?” he asks, something tiny pulling up on the corner of his mouth, and when he talks he shows off the barest ridge of pretty white teeth. “You wanna keep it?”

And there’s a full-grown man standing in his living room, naked as the day is long with tiny flecks of paint speckled on his hands like stars. But damn if Marty can do anything but think that it’s funny, maybe, how the paint on the wall and the color of Rust’s eyes are the same fucking shade of blue.

He snorts and stoops to fit the lid back on the paint can. “Put some clothes on, asshole,” he tells Rust, looking down to hide the smile spreading across his face. “Too late to head back into work now. Guess it looks like I’m making you dinner.”  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


The days of the week start to fall like dominoes and Rust’s side heals up quicker and prettier than it has any right to, mended over soft and smooth save for three nickel-sized spots of mottled pink where the worst of the damage had been. He polishes off his first pack of cigarettes and savors the next, sitting cross-legged on the back porch in the evenings to listen to the birds settle in while he goes through two or three at a time, sucking long drags off that make something curl up and tighten in Marty’s gut if he catches himself looking long enough.

Watching Rust bum around the house now in the bath robe, those first few hours where he’d lit up red-hot from the inside seem so distant now, so surreal and out of reach Marty’s not quite sure they ever happened at all. He almost wants to ask, tries to fire up the nerve a couple times and always clamps the question off behind his teeth right at the end, never quite sure of what the fuck he was even going to say.

 _Are you real?_ he’d ask, and Rust would blink slow and sleepy at him, rattle off some shit like _as real as anything else is, Marty,_ and that’d be the answer to everything and nothing in the same breath.

So Marty starts thinking about reality, or at least trying to the best way he knows how. Loads Rust up in the car and takes him to the department store, helps him find a few sets of real clothes in the men’s department, and it’s all well and good with jeans and flannel and three of the same soft jersey t-shirts in different muted colors—if anything, Rust is pretty fucking practical—until they walk through the lingerie department on the way to the escalator and Rust stops dead to finger the sleeve of a silk kimono robe printed with pink and apricot-colored roses.

“This feels real nice,” he says, sliding his hand down the arm. “Like water against your skin.”

“Don’t be gettin any ideas,” Marty says, feeling the back of his neck heat up, half-tempted to smack the robe out of Rust’s hand. “Quit touching that.”

“Figure I like the one you loaned me better anyhow,” Rust says, dropping the sleeve to make headway for the escalator, and Marty tries to think about his hypothetical shopping list as he follows—the weather report from two nights ago, his bank account, the piece of gum stuck into a display mannequin’s ear—, anything to try and scrub the thought of Rust’s high and tight ass draped over with silk out of his head, anything to make him forget it’d ever been there at all.

  
  
  
  
Rust learns to fry an egg and boil water for iced tea and boxed pasta. They finally master the art of shaving, even though Rust won’t look at himself in the mirror for too long when he does it, faring better when he goes by more touch than sight. He manages to wash and dry a load of laundry without burning the house down and then folds everything into neat little squares, his underwear and socks included.

Marty buys him an empty notebook and he draws in that instead of on the walls, sketching out birds from the yard and his own left hand and abstract little still life setups he makes with empty Lone Star cans and fresh fruit and two fishing lures filched off the table in Marty’s office, outlining the feathers and twine one follicle and fiber at a time.

He draws Marty sometimes, too, but only when he isn’t looking.

Marty eyeballs the twelve-foot crater in his yard for a couple days, muttering under his breath about getting new sod and having one more broke thing to fix until Rust goes out and stands barefoot in the center of the soft dirt, squints off into the morning light and says, “Why don’t you plant a garden?”

They till the earth up and then rake it smooth, lay flat stones around the perimeter of the circle and plant hibiscus, sweet honeysuckle and orange butterfly plants. They mulch and throw in a concrete birdbath and finish it all in one long afternoon spent getting burnt hick-red by the sun, kick back with a couple beers by the crepe myrtle tree and toast a job well done while a pair of sparrows splash in the water and a family of rabbits come out at dusk to nibble at the grass around Rust’s feet, drawn straight to him like moths to a blue flame.

Marty watches them eat his sod and press their soft noses into the palm of Rust’s hand and doesn’t say a goddamn thing about it.

  
  


The fingerprints Marty lifts off one of Rust’s morning orange juice glasses get fed through the national database and don’t turn up a single fucking name in the country. He’d gotten a second set just to be safe, and Lutz delivers the same dead-end verdict on both—if Rust stumbled out of a different life and straight into Marty’s, at least he doesn’t have a record.

Marty starts spending his lunch hour at the office combing through the archives. In-state missing persons are mostly women and children, often sucked away in a string along the coastal bayou that he’d never really thought to notice before, and any men are older and look hard-worn, nothing like the clean-shaven young thing who sits on his couch in the evenings to watch spaghetti westerns and eats vanilla ice cream with a spoonful of peach marmalade stirred in.

He reads about amnesia. Identity disorder, dementia, and dissociative fugue. Tries and fails to apply any of them to Rust, who can tell you exactly who he is down to the fine print when asked, and probably knows a whole hell of a lot more than he should by any of the usual rites.

Late one night somewhere inside the second week Rust’s been staying with him, after he hears the television click off and the other man settle down on the sofa out in the living room, Marty lies awake and thinks about who he might be himself.

Martin Eric Hart. Fifty-three years old. Retired state detective, self-employed private investigator. Married and divorced one time apiece. Father of two girls. Homeowner and neighbor, hobby fly fisherman and member at the local firing range. Holder of a few small-time rodeo titles and the proud proprietor of what more than a handful of women this side of the Mississippi had said—or screamed, maybe—was the best tongue they’d ever gotten in their life.

Marty knows who he is and has known for a real long time now, and figures he doesn’t need to examine it too closely, then, when it’s not any of those women he’s thinking about when he closes his eyes against the darkened ceiling and slips his hand under the waistband of his boxer shorts, already tenting up hot and obscene under the sheet.

The thing about Rust is that there’s nothing left to imagine, nothing left to wonder about because he’s seen it all up close and in the flesh, sweet as cake and soft as cream and fuck if Marty’s been this hard this fast in years, thinking about the sharp jut of another man’s hipbones of all things—the low-dipping small of his back and the corded sinew when it pulls tight in his forearms, the long line of his neck and the way he licks things from the bow of his top lip with the tip of a pink tongue.

And he’s never seen Rust hot and hard before but then it ain’t too tough to imagine, not too difficult to picture his chest flushed pink and the muscles of his stomach clenching tight while he works himself fast and steady, head thrown back and his breath hitching with that pretty bottom lip caught between his teeth.

It only takes a few sharp strokes and then Marty’s going and gone with his neck twisted around to muffle the strangled sound he makes in his pillow. Blackness bursts behind his eyes and all he can see while his breath comes back are dozens and dozens of tiny blue stars.

  
  
  


As the days pass, Rust starts to get colder.

Physically, internally, down to the heart of his core—he feels it. It’s a painless sensation that hangs there in a lingering haunt somewhere in the softness up under his ribcage, and he can ignore it in moments spent out in the sunshine or mornings wrapped up in Marty’s bathrobe with a cup of hot coffee that he savors like liquid gold, but it’s inescapable during the night, crawling out in spidery tendrils of ice until he’s shivering and shaking under the flannel blanket.

And there’s a pull there, a drive and a dulled ache that gets too heavy when he lets it, and tonight Rust is letting it tug him off the couch and all the way down the hall, through the parted crack in Marty’s bedroom door until he’s standing at the empty side of the bed, still trembling, counting faint strips of moonlight that slant over the other man’s side through the slatted blinds.

Rust makes up his mind and—gently, carefully, without hardly making a sound—eases himself into bed, tucks himself up under the loose corner of the blanket and slides across the mattress until he pressed flush up against Marty’s back, knees folded up behind his, careful to keep his cold toes off the backs of Marty’s calves.

The warmth blooms back in like rushing water and Marty doesn’t stir or wake beyond curving against Rust with a sigh, breathing soft and quiet when Rust reaches around to rest a hand against his stomach, tucked in close and sleepy like that’s right where he was meant to be all along.  


  
★ ★ ★  
  


Marty wakes well past first light, not yet bothering to open his eyes against yellow day filtering through the room. He feels bogged down in that cotton-lined place between dreams and waking, sleepy-warm and snug inside a cocoon of blankets, too content and pliant to even bother thinking about rolling out of bed.

When something—someone—stirs behind him, sighing awake and nosing soft into the short hair at the back of his neck, Marty curls into it on instinct, feeling the warm body press close and reach up to run a palm along his side.

“You smell different,” a voice says, familiar but softened by something foreign. “S’good, though. I like it.”

It takes three long seconds that span across a hollow eternity before Marty realizes whose voice is pressing those words soft and warm to the nape of his neck, whose body is curled around him and burning like a furnace. He goes rigid and turns until he’s on his back, and there’s Rust, sleepy-eyed with his hair mussed up from the pillow, smiling a little and blinking through the morning daylight.

“Mornin’,” he says, and Marty feels like he can’t see straight, can’t feel his legs where they’ve turned to dead weight, and he can’t quite talk—doesn’t even try—, just untangles himself from Rust and the blankets and stumbles toward the foot of the bed, through the open doorway and down the hall.

When the bathroom door latches behind him, he leans against it for a long moment and then finally flicks on the light, tries to take a piss and can’t quite muster up the courage to even do that.

In the mirror behind the sink Marty catches the eyes of his own reflection. The same shade of pale blue he’s always seen, passed down secondhand from his father. And no matter what face he pulls, no matter the angle or the lighting, there’s only one person looking back.

When he walks back into the bedroom Rust is perched on the edge of the mattress, elbows braced on his knees with his hands hanging in the wide spread between his legs. He’s almost naked save for a pair of briefs and looks up when Marty comes in, a little curl of hair fallen against his forehead.

“Marty,” he starts in, but Marty holds a hand up and cuts him off midair.

“Want you to get dressed and get your stuff together,” he says, eyes wavering between Rust and the lamp beside him. “Side’s healed up and that ankle’s been fine for more than a week now, so I reckon—reckon it’s time for you to go ahead and get on to wherever it is you’re going.”

“Where I’m going?” Rust says, eyes trying and failing to search for the answer in Marty’s face. “I thought—”

“You’re more than capable enough,” Marty says, looking away from him. “You’ll figure it out just fine.”

There’s a long moment filled with thrumming silence, the kind that’s so taut it’d sing like a harp if you reached out and touched it right, and then Rust stands from the bed to take three slow steps until Marty can see his feet on the carpet between them. When he looks up, Rust has two fingers pressed against his bottom lip, eyes cast low beneath his lashes.

“You want me to go?” he asks, quiet, and when his hand falls away there’s a moment, Marty thinks, where Rust’s mouth screws up and falters a little, come and gone in the blink of an eye.

“Yeah,” Marty tells him despite the far-off ringing in his ears, closing his eyes and turning halfway out the door. “I think it’s best you be on your way.”

Ten minutes later find Rust dressed and standing in the living room, almost an entire different person in pants and a button-up and boots all at once, turning in a half-circle on the spot so his gaze hits everything he can manage to lay eyes on. The flannel blanket and pillow he’d abandoned the still lay on the couch, and there are two empty Lone Star cans by the sink that Marty had rinsed and saved for recycling the night before.

He’s got a plastic grocery bag hooked on one finger that’s filled with a few pairs of underwear, some socks, a pack of pens, his toothbrush and razor. The sketchbook Marty gave him is clutched in hand and pressed into his side hard enough to bruise the line of his hip, like if he holds on tight enough maybe it’ll keep him anchored to the spot.

Marty has never felt so fucking absurd in his entire life, never felt so much like he was wading through a thirty-minute soap opera or a foggy water dream, where the more you struggle the harder it is to move, but it keeps on playing out in real fluid time when he steps into the foyer and swings the front door wide.

“Good luck out there,” is what he says, and Rust won’t look at him, not even when Marty claps him on the shoulder and winces so hard he can’t hardly see straight when he does it.

At the end of the walk Rust stops and turns with his boot scuffing along the pavement in a harsh sound. Their eyes finally brush and meet through the buttery daylight, for once stripped bare of any birdsong, and for a split second Marty feels impossibly small looking back at him, insignificant, shrunk down to nothing but dust in the shadow of something bigger.

“Thought for sure I had it right,” Rust says, and then squints off toward the end of the street with the line of his throat working fast. “I’m sorry, Marty. For putting all this on you.”

Marty feels something starting to bubble up in his chest, something hot and agitated and ugly. “Rust,” he starts to say, but the other man only nods and walks to the end of the driveway, briefly looks both ways, chooses left and starts off slow down the block.

When he finally yanks the door shut—on Rust, on himself, on that place in his head he thought he’d sealed off a long time ago—, Marty leans against the kitchen counter for a minute and tries to figure out why, suddenly, it feels like he can’t really breathe.  
  


  
★ ★ ★  
  
  


The first hour goes by without any hang-ups save for the fact that the house and yard have both turned into living graveyard reminders, and Marty thinks he might be losing it this time, finally coming undone for good.

And it’s fucked up, maybe, real fucking scary how similar the air around him echoes in mimicry of that day ten years ago when Maggie finally laid out her ultimatum and left his life in two suitcases by the door. How it feels like he’s let another good thing slip free without any putting up any semblance of an honest fight, and part of him seems to understand—unshakably, inexplicably—like he’s gone and made another huge mistake.

But that woman and those two girls had been everything. Every single thing for twenty years when Rust had been—what? Two weeks and a thorn in his side since the night he showed up in the back yard. Two weeks of cigarette butts in a repurposed can on the porch, two weeks of licking preserves off a tablespoon. Two weeks of Marty waking up and knowing the house wasn’t empty, that he wasn’t alone, that he had _somebody_ and yet there’s no reason for him to feel this, not over a perchance encounter or situational circumstance, a good deed gone on too long, and a one-time fucking fluke.

Over a man, Marty tells himself. Not over a man.

But he paces through the living room and sees Rust scrawled on the walls, passes the sliding glass door and tries to forget the garden plot out back where life’s already thriving and flourishing away like a small oasis, sprung up big and green and beautiful from the barren earth. Opens the fridge and shuts it again when he catches sight of that goddamned jar of half-eaten peach marmalade, the third one he’d had to buy in two weeks, and wonders why it’s easier to let it sit there than throw it away.

When Marty finally walks back through the bedroom, gone to fetch his reading glasses off the nightstand, he catches sight of something else sitting there in their place. It’s a folded piece of heavy drawing paper creased careful down the middle, and opens up in his hands to reveal two portraits sketched out there on staggered sides of the page.

They’re him, of course. Hatched out in perfect detail with a ballpoint pen, pulled free from living moments spent out in the back yard with a beer in hand and then sitting on one end of the couch with his frames low on his nose, two knuckles brought up to his mouth while he reads something settled in his lap.

Down in one corner, written in a cramped but elegant hand, are the words _Lone Star_.  
  
  
  
  


Marty showers, shaves, and gets dressed. He checks his email and runs the dishwasher, throws in a load of laundry and sits down at his desk with a stack of office paperwork. There’s no analog clock anywhere in the house but he can still hear the hands ticking in his head like a metronome, and after a half-hour of rereading the same three lines on an invoice without getting any further down the page he picks up the phone and calls in an order at the Chinese place down the street.

The woman on the other end of the line laughs when he gives his address for delivery. “We heard all about your boyfriend,” she says, before her voice softens a little. “Is he doing better now—with his head and everything?”

It’s not until Marty hangs up that he realizes he ordered enough food for two people.

“Shit,” he says out loud to the empty house, standing from the couch to shove his feet into his shoes by the door, swearing the whole way through the house and back when he comes down the hall with a folded piece of paper fisted in one hand. “Shit, shit, goddamn motherfucking _shit_.”

He doesn’t bother to lock up the house behind him, only leaves a few crumpled bills sticking out from under the doormat on the porch and gets in his car, hangs a sharp left out of the driveway and tears three blocks down the street before he slams on the brakes under the overhang of an old oak tree.

Marty sits in the car for a moment, biting hard on the inside of his cheek, and watches as a single cigarette butt falls from above, bounces off the windshield, and rolls onto the pavement outside his door.

The keys are still dinging in the ignition when he steps out into the middle of the street and looks up into the branches of the tree, head tipped back with a hand held aloft to shield his eyes from the sun burning through the leaves.

“Rust,” he says, pushing the car door shut. “What the fuck are you doing up there?”

He’s about fifteen feet up, straddling the base of a thick, gnarled branch draped over with moss and canted back against the trunk with one leg swinging idle through the open air. The plastic grocery bag is hooked on a sturdy twig up near his head with the sketchbook carefully wedged in a fork between two branches.

Rust pulls a single cigarette out of his shirt pocket and flicks a plastic lighter to life, cupping his hand around the flame until the end catches and burns. “Guess I live here now,” he says on exhale, not bothering to peer down at Marty. “You can write, if you want.”

“You’re gonna live in this tree?” Marty asks. “This one here in particular.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, reaching off to the side to ash his cigarette. “Why not? Got nowhere fucking else to go.”

Marty braces an elbow against the roof of his car and leans into it, reaching up to run a palm over his head until he’s gripping the back of his neck. “What happens when you run out of cigarettes?” He smiles a little, then, feeling like he’s gone a hair’s breadth manic. “And where are you gonna keep a jar of preserves up there, you reckon?”

“Don’t suppose that’ll matter much,” Rust mumbles, letting the cigarette hang slack in the corner of his mouth. “Ain’t gonna last too much longer anyhow, considering.”

He keeps swinging his leg slow, slow, back and forth in an endless kind of toil that makes the branch bob a little above Marty’s head. Another car drives past with the passenger openly mooning out the window at them, all but pressed up against the glass for a better look up into the tree, and Marty has to curl his free hand into a fist lest a neighborly wave turns into a free bird for their trouble.

“Will you stop doing that?” he says, voice strained around the edges. “It’s—fucking distracting me, man.”

“Doing what?” Rust asks, and his leg starts to swing faster. He finally squints down at Marty and pulls the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, thumbing along the edge of the filter. “You told me to leave, Marty, so I don’t think you got any business out here right now, telling me what to fuckin do.”

“Well,” Marty says on a heavy sigh, tipping his head back to look up into the tree again. “Well Rust, now I’m telling—shit—asking, _asking_ you to come back.”

Rust is quiet for a moment, and then another cigarette butt is flicking down onto the pavement, rolling to a stop a few inches from Marty’s left shoe. “What if ask you to fuck off?” he says, though the words come out quiet, hit the ground a little softer than they look.

“Then maybe I deserve it,” Marty says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “And maybe I’ll just leave the front door unlocked, y’know, for when you decide you don’t want oak splinters in your ass anymore.”

Another car drives by slowly and he weakly slaps the flat of his hand against the roof of the Cadillac. “Will you please just get the fuck down here before you fall and break something for real? Jesus Christ, you’re making me nervous.”

“Think you’re making yourself nervous,” Rust says, but then his leg stops swinging and he tilts his head off to one side, watching for a moment with sleepy eyes. “You really want me? There, with you.”

Marty closes his eyes and breathes in deep through his nose. The birdsong has started back up again, lilting light and sweet through the afternoon air, while a pair of squirrels chatter to one another in the tree, scurrying together along a branch above Rust’s head.

“To be completely fucking honest with you, I haven’t wanted something this much in a long time. And it scares the shit out of me, but yeah, man—yeah.”

He looks up into the tree and Rust looks back. “So if you’ll have me, then,” he stammers out, flushing hot when he does it, “I want you to come back.”

“If you’re insisting,” Rust says, the corner of his mouth pulling up on one side just enough to give him away. “Heads up.”

He drops the sketchbook and plastic bag without much ado and watches Marty half-lunge to catch them, and then grabs hold of the branch and swings down and around until he’s hanging by two hands eight feet above the ground, showing off a sliver of stomach where his undershirt’s come untucked.

“Rust!” Marty wheezes, dropping the plastic bag, and then Rust is touching down on the ground as light-footed as a cat in his boots, watching Marty from the corner of his eye.

“Well,” he says, taking the sketchbook from Marty’s hand. “Now what?”

“I ordered Chinese,” Marty sighs, reaching up to scratch an itch that isn’t there on the bridge of his nose. “Turns out half of it is all the shit you like.”

“Alright,” Rust says, and lets Marty drive him the three blocks back home.  
  


★ ★ ★  
  
  


Hot afternoon bleeds out into balmy summer evening, and at this new onset of his second coming, Rust makes sure to keep his distance.

When the delivery driver had come to the door with a plastic bag printed with a garish yellow smiley face, he’d peered around Marty’s shoulder to get a good look at Rust sitting perched at the kitchen counter, fully-clothed with his boots still laced up in full.

“Hey man,” he’d said, and it took a small act of God for Marty to not slam the door in his face. “You sure look different with clothes on.”

Rust doesn’t strip a single layer off all evening save for his shoes after dinner, and the robe hanging washed and clean on the back of the bathroom door stays untouched. He picks up a pen and the morning newspaper in lieu of watching that older bob-haired woman roll out homemade pie crust on the food network when Marty makes a point of stopping on the channel, and then starts circling things on the classifieds page one at a time.

“What’re you doing?” Marty asks him, walking in from the kitchen to settle down on the couch next to Rust.

“Looking for a job,” Rust says, underlining something that looks like _nighttime construction and manual labor_ , and then folds the newspaper in half before climbing to his feet. He disappears down the hall for a few minutes and after Marty hears the toilet flush, he comes back in to settle in the armchair across the room to resume his job search.

A quarter past nine and one failed attempt at trying to lure Rust out of the armchair with peach ice cream later, the phone rings and Marty feels his stomach twist when Maggie’s number flashes across the display. He’s up off the couch in an instant and answering halfway down the hall to his office, talking in low tones while the TV drones on from the living room.

She asks, of course, about Rust, and Marty realizes he’d lied that first night he rang her up at three in the morning, called him by another named pulled from the swirling ether of borderline panic—Jack, Jim, or Johnny, one of the three, and he knows Maggie catches it the second _Rust_ comes out of his mouth.

They talk real polite. Always have, in the years after the divorce, and Maggie doesn’t pry or push or break out the silver tongue until Marty goes to hang up and she says, “I’ve heard you spin a lot of bullshit over the years, Marty, but I can’t say I ever expected it to be about another man.”

“Yeah,” he tells her, laughing despite himself, him and Rust and everything. “Me either.”

Five minutes after he ends the call, Marty walks back into the living room and finds the television turned off, Rust in his undershirt and a pair of sweats and already tucked in for the night on the sofa.

He’s facing away with his head nestled into the pillow, still breathing too loud to be asleep, and Marty locks the front door before he turns and says, a little dumbly, “What’re you doing? It’s only 9:30.”

“Trying to sleep, Marty,” Rust says, not bothering to turn over, and a crease pulls tight between Marty’s eyes as he flips off the light and slowly makes his own way to bed.

  
  
  


Marty blinks awake a few minutes past four in the morning and knows inside an instant that Rust isn’t in the house.

He’s up out of bed in a flash and down the hall, checking the garage, the driveway, the front door. The car’s still there and the lock hasn’t been touched, and it takes Marty a few moments of prying panic’s claws out of his chest one talon at a time before he sees that the sliding glass door is cracked open, just enough to let a thread of cricket song inside.

When he steps out onto the back porch, he sees Rust standing in the middle of the garden, looking out across the star-dusted velvet night. He’s barefoot amidst the soil and flowers, still only wearing his undershirt and a pair of sweats slung too-low around his hips, and has—Marty still can’t hardly believe it, not even after the rabbits, the mockingbird and the little rust-colored fox—a barn owl perched on his forearm, soft cream and speckled with a pale moon face to match the full one hanging in the sky above.

Rust is stroking two fingers down the feathers on its chest and smiles when the bird inclines its head for him, twisting this way and that to get him to scratch around its neck. Marty watches them as he walks up, clearing his throat loud enough that the owl turns on him with wide, unblinking black eyes and chirps low until Rust turns to look over his shoulder.

“Why are you out here?” Marty asks as gently as he can manage, stepping around the birdbath to stand at Rust’s opposite shoulder. The owl blinks at him once, spreads its wings, and then with a little boost takes off into the night like a ghost, leaving several perfect tiny punctures in the soft skin of Rust’s inner arm.

“Guess the hunt’s a little slow tonight,” Rust says by way of answering, watching the owl dip behind the branches of a tall oak and vanish from view.

“You’re bleeding,” Marty tells him for lack of anything better to say, nodding toward the pricks of blood welling up on Rust’s arm.

Rust looks down at them and blinks, and when the pads of his fingers swipe over the skin breaks they disappear, blood wiped away like it’d never been there at all. “Not anymore,” he says, and then tips his head back to look up at the stars.

“Maybe you should come back inside,” Marty says, dizzy, mouth gone dry as bleached cotton. His toes sink down into the cool earth and he shivers despite the honey-thickness of warmth hanging heavy across the night. “It’s—it’s too late to be out here like this.”

“I ain’t tired, Marty.”

“That’s fine, but I want you to come back inside and come to bed.”

“Last I checked,” Rust says, finally lowering his gaze to rest heavy along the line of Marty’s jaw, “the couch doesn’t count as a bed.”

Rust’s skin glows like porcelain under the throw of moon and starlight and he’s beautiful beneath it, the most gorgeous fucking thing Marty’s ever seen, but his eyes are endless and there’s a moment, then, when Marty finds them—sharp as blue diamonds in the raw—, where he knows everything. Everything and nothing, because Rust’s eyes are like twin windows into the endless wheel of time and space, and in a split second come and gone Marty can finally see.

Rust is as ancient and immense as one of the old gods and he burns in a light that never goes out, a light that death itself would have to reach up and pinch from the sky between a finger and thumb, and Marty knows he should drop to his knees, that he should tremble and whisper prayers into the creases of Rust’s thighs until the whole world was shattered and coming down, that Rust might have fell but he’s the one, now, who is fallen.

He reaches out instead, into the void of space between them, and slides his fingers down the back of Rust’s arm to gently take his hand.

“Come on,” Marty says, and when he pulls Rust moves with him—across the earth and through the dew-damp grass, behind the sliding glass door and down the darkened hall. They only stop when they’re in the bedroom and Marty is guiding Rust down onto the mattress and then letting him go to slide in on the other side, watching the smoky outline of Rust’s body through the grey-lit dark.

The long line of his back is curved where he sits rigid on the side of the bed, turned away with his head bowed low. When Marty murmurs his name he shifts into motion, slow, like he can only manage to move an inch at a time, and stretches out along the sheets until he’s settled back against the pillow.

There might as well be a thousand miles left between them when he finally whispers something through the dark, half-hoarse with his voice a lacework made up of nothing but hairline fractures. “I can’t leave again, Marty,” he says. “Not now. It’d kill me.”

“C’mere,” Marty says, reaching out until his fingers touch cold skin, and when Rust’s fingers brush the back of his arm that’s the final answer, and this time Marty goes to him, slides in close against Rust’s back and folds his knees up behind the other man’s thighs, presses his nose into the soft hair at the nape of Rust’s neck and holds him there until the tension cuts loose and bleeds free from his body.

Rust curls back against him and sighs, a small sound pitched pure and petal-soft, and in that moment Marty can’t find any fear or shame, for once, when he knows what he’s got and how he’s been gotten.

They go to sleep like that, curved together with two hearts keeping matched time, and Marty doesn’t know, not yet, that his beat had been made a long time ago to match the pulse and thump of a blue-bright star.  
  
  


★ ★ ★  
  
  


Marty wakes to the soft lull of quiet breath, sunlight warm on his back and Rust’s eyes blinking sleepy at him from half a pillow away. They’re both curled on their sides, facing one another along the seam of the bed, not quite touching but close enough to feel the shared throw of body heat.

“You watchin me sleep?” Marty slurs, screwing his face up when he stretches his back until it shifts and pops. Rust tucks an elbow under his head and yawns a little, hair mussed up where he’d apparently been rooting around in his sleep.

“Maybe,” he says, shifting his legs under the blanket so the side of one foot skims down the length of Marty’s calf. “You were dreaming a lot last night.”

“How you figure that?”

Rust shrugs one shoulder, and Marty has to keep himself from reaching out and touching the strap of his undershirt where it’s loose and twisted crooked. “Can hear you, sometimes.”

“There’s no way I talk in my fucking sleep,” Marty grunts, lacing his fingers together over his stomach. “As a matter of fact, I know I don’t.”

“You don’t,” Rust tells him with a tiny little edge of a smile. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t hear you.”

Marty wants to snag the edge of that and unravel it somehow, get him to spin some ounce of the truth out, but Rust is already slipping from beneath the covers and standing from the bed, turning so his stomach is striped over with bands of yellow light.

“I can make breakfast, if you want,” he says, thumb tracing along the edge of one hip as he stretches. “What d’you feel like having?”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Marty says, feeling steeped down deep in something soft and sun-faded around the edges. “I’ll take whatever you want.”

  
  
  


They’re out in the yard under the afternoon heat, planting peony and snapdragon seeds in the planters running alongside the house when Marty reaches up and wipes a hand across the back of his forehead, drops his spade in the hose-dampened dirt and says, “What were you really doing out here last night?”

Rust reaches into the little plastic bags of soil that Marty picked up a few days before at the hardware store and pulls two stargazer lily bulbs out, untangling the fine roots with his fingertips like he’s touching the seams of a spider web.

“It’s real different from this angle, being down here and looking back up,” he says. “The others, they—they don’t look the same, you know? From this far away.”

Marty gnaws along the edge of his lip for a moment and then digs a shallow hole for the stargazer bulb, gesturing for Rust to nestle it roots-down in the earth. “Do they know where you are?”

“Yeah,” Rust says, gently mounding and smoothing dirt around the top of the bulb with his hands. “They’ll keep an eye on me.”

The mockingbird pair is out and about to enjoy the day, splashing and chattering away in the birdbath, dipping low to comb their beaks through the water for a drink. Marty watches them and then turns his eyes on the rusty-colored fox that peeks out from beneath the azalea bushes at the far end of the adjacent lot, taking a moment to spring and pounce on something in the grass before trotting over to them without fear, sniffing its way around the edge of the garden plot.

“Never seen anything quite like these animals being so taken with you,” Marty says, quiet, careful not to move too fast when he sets the spade down. The fox blinks and then seems to bow its head, coming up to Rust with its tail and ears lowered in deference, and lets him reach out to stroke a few fingers along its neck before crouching closer to Marty.

“You can touch him, if you want,” Rust says, watching the fox move. “He came to you on his own terms.”

Marty holds out an open palm and the fox’s ears twitch, but then he steps forward close enough that Marty can run a few fingers through the coarse hair at the scruff of his neck, tentative at first, before he presses down more and can feel the delicate ridge of a shoulder blade through the dense coat.

“Huh,” Marty breathes out, smiling a little as the fox leans further into his hand before slinking off to chase lizards through the flowers. “Never done a thing like that before.”

Rust settles back on his hands and closes his eyes, tipping his face toward the sun. “This world is a beautiful kind of place,” he says. “Ugly around the edges, maybe, but still beautiful at the core. You watch long enough, that’s easy to figure out.”

“Seen a lot of ugly here,” Marty says, not moving despite the day burning his arms and knees pink. “More than my fair share, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, ducking under the shade of the awning and blinking through the sunspots dancing in front of his eyes. “Haven’t we all.”

The mockingbirds take flight and swoop up to land in the crepe myrtle tree. Afternoon grows longer in the tooth and Marty thinks he wants to take Rust’s hands in his and wash the dirt off them, rinse them clean and make it like they’d never dug down in the soil at all.

“I reckon you probably miss the—the others,” is what he says, in a voice that doesn’t quite belong to him but which tells the truth all the same. “And I want to make it so you’re happy here, best I can. So if you need anything to be comfortable, I mean, I’ll—”

“You’ve done a lot for me already, Marty,” Rust says, soft but firm, and all Marty can do is watch the bead of sweat on his neck slide down into the little dip at the base of his throat. “All this is more than enough.”

Marty sighs and palms the spade, standing on creaking joints to survey their work in the flower beds. Rust rises to stand next to him and pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket to clamp between his lips, thumbing the flame on his cheap lighter to life.

“Y’know, you say that,” Marty says, bending to pick up the watering can and tipping it so makeshift rain sprinkles out over the stargazer bulbs. “But I’m not quite so sure I believe it.”

“How you figure that?” Rust asks, blowing a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

“You told me one time you came down here to find something,” Marty says, and Rust’s eyes are on him in an instant, blue ice despite the fired-brick heat. “And I figure, considering the line of business I work and all, I guess I’d be the one to help you find it.”

“Maybe,” Rust says, sucking off another drag before slowly making his way across the lawn, bare feet whispering through the grass. “It’d be funny, how that all worked out.”

Marty picks up his spade and wads the empty seed packets into one fist before heading for the garage in Rust’s wake. At the edge of yard, the fox emerges from the azalea bushes with a garden mole in his mouth, gold eyes watching Marty disappear around side of the house before he turns and scampers off through the brush.  
  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Rust had quietly insisted on staying home when Marty said he was going out to pick up a few things around town, sitting there in the living room he’d hand-painted to look like a map of the night sky, scrawling things in his notebook with a blue pen.

Marty tells him that’s alright, and then decides to make the most of it.

He makes a quick run through the grocery store for a box of lasagna noodles and a tub of ricotta, plucks a free recipe card out of the kiosk by the sliding door, walks up and down the wine and spirits aisle eyeballing the pairing chart until he finds a bottle he likes. Fresh peaches and another box of Swiss roll cakes, and god damn if he doesn’t stop in front of the floral stand and fight himself off plucking a paper-wrapped bouquet of lilies from the cooler.

He walks back out into the Louisiana sunshine sans flowers and starts stowing groceries in the trunk when a late-night commercial comes back to him like the cross-section of an old dream, pulled free from that first night full of starlight and static when he’d woken up in the dark and followed a red beacon into his own back yard.

There’s a tech-savvy gadget store across the street in a new strip mall, and Marty slides two fifty spots and a few incentives across the counter in exchange for the already-assembled display model. The lone employee on register packs it up in an empty toilet paper box and keeps narrowing his eyes real skeptical-like, like Marty doesn’t belong in this shop full of blue-blinking LED lights and glass spheres full of sea monkeys, standing there in jeans and creased flannel with a sliver of wifebeater peeking through.

“Would’ve killed for something like this when I was little,” the guy says, pushing the box across the counter. “You got a kid who’s into space stuff or something?”

“No kids in the house anymore,” Marty says, smiling as he hitches the box up against one hip and turns to head out the door. “Only thing I got on hand is a homesick star.”

  
  
  


Rust slips outside when he pulls back into the driveway and stands on the front walk until Marty puts it in park and gets out. “Lemme give you a hand,” he murmurs, loading up one arm with plastic grocery bags, and makes no sign he’s noticed the cardboard box nestled in the far corner of the trunk.

They get the groceries unloaded and then Marty steps back out, coming in a few seconds later with the box cradled in two hands while Rust rinses peaches in the sink. “Come over here for a second when you get finished with that,” he says, searching along the walls for an empty outlet. “Wanna show you something.”

“Show me what?” Rust asks, padding back into the living room. He stands stone-still while he watches Marty pull the blinds and then slide the hanging ones shut to block out the light coming in through the sliding glass door. When it’s dark save for only a few faint cracks of yellow bleeding in seams along the edges of the window and door, Marty pulls something out of the box and plugs it into the wall before setting it down on the coffee table.

“Hope this thing works,” he mumbles, laughing a little under his breath, and then clicks on the light.

The darkened room immediately flares up with hundreds and hundreds of tiny blue and white stars, moving and twinkling through the constellations and whorls of space mapped along the living room walls. They glimmer on Rust’s arms and face like freckles made of sapphire and diamond, and he looks toward the ceiling where it’s lit up like an open window leading into the nighttime sky, eyes tuned bright enough to match the painted light.

Marty slips his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “It’s really just a kid’s toy, man,” he says, gently clearing his throat. “But I thought—uh, thought it might help.”

In the center of the room, Rust carefully folds in on himself until he’s lying back on the carpet, knees bent with his arms crossed behind his head to stare up at the surrounding walls.

“Come here, Marty,” he says, edges of the request worn down soft and smooth, and Marty sinks down next to him on the ground without a thought, no longer bothering with watching the lamp-lit stars because there’s a faint glow spreading through the thin cotton of Rust’s undershirt, the hollow of his chest filled with the beginnings of a bleeding golden light.

“Rust,” Marty tries to say. “Rust, you—you’re—”

“I know,” Rust says, fingers ghosting over the back of Marty’s arm when he reaches up as if to take a handful of sky from the ceiling. “Thank you.”  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Marty puts the lasagna together one layer at a time, talking in low tones to Rust where he stands and watches, canted up loose and languid against the kitchen bar. There are two noodles left in the bottom of the pot when he’s done, and Marty rolls them up with ricotta while they wait for dinner to bake, hands one off to Rust and tells him, “My mom’d likely whip me for even saying it if she were still alive, but this is actually the best way to eat this shit. Don’t know why people even bother with the rest of it, less they’re trying to impress somebody.”

Rust chuckles a little as he licks a dollop of cheese off the heel of his hand, and then watches as Marty’s cheeks flush bright red while he makes himself real busy with scrubbing out a pot in the sink.

When the food’s on the table, Marty cracks open the wine bottle and pours them out a couple helpings of something sparkling white in a pair of margarita glasses he got free out of a date two years earlier where the glasses had been the only thing to come back home with him. They get the job done, though, and halfway through his lasagna Rust is looking a little pinker in the cheeks than before, a tendril of hair loose and curling against his temple.

“Y’know what I’ve always wanted to try?” he says, running the tip of a finger around the edge of his glass. “S’fuckin stupid as hell.”

“What?” Marty asks, knocking back his last mouthful of wine. He’s in a right better state than Rust but can still feel the warmth spreading through his stomach, unfurling like an open flower. “You gotta tell me.”

“What’s that shit called?” Rust says, blinking at Marty. “With the two naked bananas.”

Marty inhales sharp and nearly chokes on thin air. “What?” he rasps out. “T—two naked bananas?”

“Yeah,” Rust says, serious. “With the three scoops of ice cream, and they do it up all nice with whipped cream and a cherry? You know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“You…you want a banana split sundae?” Marty laughs, sagging back against his chair. “Jesus fucking Christ, man.”

“What?” Rust asks, taking another swig of wine out of his margarita glass. “Can we make one here, d’you reckon?”

“If you’d had told me this shit earlier, I would’ve bought some fucking bananas,” Marty says, pushing back from the table. He picks up their plates and then makes a vague gesture towards Rust’s glass with his elbow. “Hold back on that for now and try to get your shoes on. Ain’t going back to the store tonight, but gimme a minute to clean this up—I know just the place.”

  
  
  


The ice cream parlor is like a little glass lunchbox painted red and white, neon-lit and bordered on all sides with concrete tables peaked by candy-striped umbrellas. There’s a nice-sized crowd sitting outside with soft serve and hot fudge sundaes, talking low and laughing with one another as Rust and Marty walk up to the building. Retired couples, a few families staying busy wiping chocolate smears off toddler faces, and—in the far corner next to the only open table—a slew of young guys, probably fresh off their first year of college or trade school judging by the looks of them, busy hollering and shooting straw paper across the patio at one another.

“Save the table ‘til I get back,” Marty says, briefly eyeballing the crew of kids before disappearing inside the parlor, and Rust sits facing away from them toward the parking lot, lights up a cigarette and blows smoke up into the early night.

Marty comes back five minutes later with a sundae that he sets down in front of Rust, already biting off the top off a sugar cone he’s got in the opposite hand. “All yours,” he says, muttering low as he watches Rust pluck the shiny cherry off the top and bite it clean from the stem. “Two naked bananas. Tear it up.”

Rust eats with as much care and thought as he does anything else, taking small bites and pressing the different flavors and textures up against the roof of his mouth. He goes slow enough that his sundae’s melting down faster than he can finish it, though he still looks up and nods at the cone Marty’s still working steady on.

“What did you get?” he asks, and Marty holds it out without a thought to show him.

“Some kind of salted caramel deal,” he says offhand, feeling a jolt of hot surprise in his stomach when Rust leans in the rest of the way to wrap a few fingers around his wrist and slurp a mouthful off the top.

He hums in contentment and lets his lashes drip shut, fingers sliding soft and easy down Marty’s arm. “Jesus, that’s good,” he says, thumbing at the corner of his mouth, and only blinks his eyes back open when stifled laughter and kissy noises start up from the table next to them.

Marty’s chewing hard on the inside of his cheek, looking elsewhere with a pink tint burning high and hot around his throat. Rust flicks his eyes over the group in a cursory onceover before picking his spoon back up, a faintly pinched expression pulling tight around his eyes.

“Oh shit,” one of the guys says while the rest of them choke and snort into their drinks, “I wonder if grandpa’s trophy wife over there sucks dick as good as he licks that shit.”

Rust takes another bite and turns an eye back on them, lazy and unbothered until Marty makes to stand, taking the rest of his cone with him. “Marty—” he says in halfhearted warning, reaching out too late to catch hold of the other man’s elbow as he stalks off toward the trashcan.

The rest of the cone gets pitched in the garbage and Marty comes to a halt behind the group’s speaker, throwing his best good ole’ boy expression into place. “We got a problem over here, fellas?” he asks, rubbing his hands together. “Or are you gonna mind your fucking business and take it on home for the night.”

“No problem,” one of them says while the rest go quiet, and Marty nods stiffly and starts to walk over to Rust when he chimes back in, “but maybe you should get bent and let prettyboy over there fuck you for a change.”

The fight breaks out hard and fast and all five of the college kids are still trying to scramble up from the table when Marty winds up and clocks the wise one right in the mouth, sending him keeling over backwards onto the patio with a sharp crack and a thud.

He gets a few more swings in before it’s clear they’re working four against one, and a fist catches Marty in the side just before he feels his mouth light up like it’s on fire. The world blacks out for a second, bursting back behind his eyes in an explosion of smeared light and neon stars, and when he can see again Rust is up from behind the table and knocking the others down one by one, letting them crumple under his hands like towers of toppling blocks.

There’s a nasty crunch when he busts the last one’s nose open and sends him staggering off into the parking lot, and then he’s up in Marty’s space and touching two fingers light against the hammering pulse in his neck while he only breathes a little quicker than usual himself, not even broken out into so much as a paltry sweat.

“Shit,” Rust says after a moment, lowering his hand and looking down at the mess on the patio by their feet while a crowd starts to gather round. “I dropped my fucking ice cream.”

  


They get in the car and tear off down the street before sirens can begin to wail in the distance, and Marty stays silent the whole drive home, watching passing streetlights flicker over the bruised knuckles on his right hand while he tongues the stinging split in his bottom lip.

He keeps fuming when they finally get in through the front door, going around slamming cabinet doors in the bathroom and kitchen looking for the first aid kit he swore he put away a week before, but has disappeared from fucking creation now that he needs it. A couple mouthfuls drawn off whatever’s left in the wine bottle don’t do much to dilute the bitter burn roiling in the pit of his stomach, and it’s not until Rust gets him by the elbow and leads him to the sofa that he really comes low down enough to stop and exhale.

“Let me look at that,” Rust says, gentle, one hand resting on Marty’s knee as he leans in. “Split it pretty deep, but at least it’s clean.”

“Can’t find the fucking first aid,” Marty murmurs, slanting his eyes down into his lap. “Knowing my luck it probably needs stitches, and there’s no way—”

“It won’t,” Rust says, suddenly closer than he was before, and Marty freezes when he sees his hand come up, suddenly can’t breathe too good anymore when he feels the pad of Rust’s thumb settle soft against the swell of his bottom lip.

“Hold still,” Rust says, words soft enough to lie on, and fuck if Marty could even move if he tried.

He’s vaguely aware of a burning pinch of white light along the borders of his vision. The air around them charges up for a second while warmth bleeds through his body like a rolling wave, one rush of tsunami water from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and then it’s gone, it’s gone and every ache in his body is wiped so clean he almost can’t remember what it ever felt like to hurt at all.

Rust’s hand doesn’t move, though, not even when Marty finally manages to lift his eyes and look. He almost expects to find something else sitting there—something bigger and brighter, made from black velvet and blue light, but it’s only Rust looking back at him, Rust with his thumb still resting light against the skin it healed back into a perfect seam.

“Tell me, Marty,” he says, leaning in slow, and his breath is easy and warm and so damn close. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I ain’t telling you nothing,” Marty says, barely anything more than a hoarse whisper, and his eyes fall shut just as Rust’s lips find his, come in soft and light to press against the place where his thumb had been only a moment before.

It’s chaste and sweet and then Rust is pulling back just as gently as he came in, eyes burning feverish and too-bright, so heavy on Marty’s when he finally opens them that he can feel his lungs wring out like wet rags in his chest.

“Yeah, Marty?” Rust rasps, tongue darting out to wet his bottom lip, and when Marty gets a handful of his shirt and pulls him back in, that’s all the answer he can really give.

Whatever had been reigning him back before snaps clean and then Rust is on him in a frenzy, hands come around to fist urgent and tight in the sides of Marty’s overshirt, and he’s like a ball of heat lightning stuck inside a locked room, bolts of electricity bursting through him into Marty wherever their lips and bodies happen to meet.

“Hey,” Marty murmurs, half-dazed, pressing a hand against the other man’s chest like an anchor until he stops long enough to catch his breath. “You gotta—gotta slow down. Take it easy, not so fast yet.”

Rust nods and leans back a little, letting Marty come in to meet him this time, slow, slow, parting his lips and moaning soft when Marty’s fingers come up to brace around the base of his skull, holding him there while he licks easy into the seam of his mouth.

“Marty,” Rust says against his lips, half-broken, hands come up to grapple around Marty’s neck and shoulders, and the way he’s moving it’s like he’s trying to crawl in his lap, sliding close and gasping when Marty’s mouth meets his neck, pressing kisses along the hinge of his jaw and sucking soft and wet against the line of his throat.

“Be still,” Marty tells him, laughing a little breathless. He braces a few fingers around Rust’s chin and turns him gently, coming back to catch his bottom lip and then push past it, shivering when Rust makes a little noise that rattles in his throat. “Slow,” he says once they pull back apart, feeling Rust’s hands slide up to lace around the back of his neck. “Just like this.”

They keep on and it’s all trial and error, give and take, but Rust picks it up fast and then he’s rearing to go, panting against Marty’s mouth and neck, writhing around and gasping when familiar hands come up to span underneath his shirt, thumb tracing the line of skin just below his navel.

Rust rolls forward and ruts against Marty’s hip awkward and sloppy and oh, there it is—he’s hot and hard through his jeans and Marty groans, dropping his hand down to palm there without a real thought, and as soon as he gets a handful through the denim Rust curses fast and dirty against the corner of his mouth.  

“ _Fuck,_ ” he hisses, fingers scrabbling for purchase around Marty’s shoulders as he pushes against his hand. “I—I ain’t ever—oh fuck, Marty, don’t you stop.”

Rust’s belt gets unbuckled and his zipper’s undone and then Marty’s reaching down to touch Rust through his briefs, both of them breathing fast when he leans in close to whisper, “You—you want me to?”

“God yes,” Rust rasps, and then makes a bitten-off noise like he’s been shot when Marty yanks the waistband of his briefs down and takes Rust’s cock, already aching hard and soft as hot silk in his hand.

Rust bucks up into his fist and when Marty thumbs over the head of his dick he jerks sharp, bowing over to bury his face in the junction between Marty’s neck and shoulder. His mouth opens there against warm skin and he’s caught between hissing and sucking weak hickeys along the side of the other man’s throat, and that lasts all of about a minute before he’s honest-to-God keening in Marty’s ear and coming hot and sticky between them.

“You’re a quick shot, cowboy,” Marty says, laughing a little as he gentles Rust through the rest of it, already gone limp as a pile of rags against him.

“Never done that before,” Rust pants, fingers tracing mindless patterns around the nape of Marty’s neck, thighs and stomach still trembling. “Didn’t—didn’t know that’s what you could feel.”

“Lord,” Marty says, caught somewhere between a laugh and a moan. “Don’t tell me you’re some kinda 35-million-year-old virgin.”

When Rust leans back to find his eyes the answer is spelled out loud and clear, and all Marty can do is groan down deep in his chest when his cock twitches hard in his jeans. “Baby, you’re gonna kill me yet.”

He wipes his hand on the leg of his pants and Rust isn’t even tucked away before he’s reaching down to fumble at Marty’s belt buckle, yanking the end free through the loop. “C’mon,” he says, still straddling Marty’s lap. “Wanna do you now.”

Marty is thick and heavy and already leaking when Rust takes him in hand, fingers soft and gentle despite the urgency building in his breath. He tries to mimic Marty’s technique with a twisting upstroke and it’s too-tight, not quite hitting the right rhythm, and Marty reaches down to take Rust’s hand in his so they’re both wrapped together around his cock.

“Easy, easy,” he rasps, guiding Rust’s fingers from the base back up. “Don’t grip too tight, you ain’t playing baseball, just take it—oh fuck, Rust, there you go.”

Marty drops Rust’s hand and lets him take the lead, sinking back further into the couch. “You’re doing real good, baby,” he says, reaching out to get a hold on Rust’s hips when his hand starts working faster. “Just like that.”

“Been wanting to touch you like this, Marty,” Rust says, leaning forward to bite along Marty’s jaw. “Been thinking about it a while now.”

“Christ,” Marty groans, tipping his head back under the weight of Rust’s mouth. “W—what else you been thinking about?”

Marty’s close, already so fucking close, and then Rust’s lips are hot against the soft spot under his ear, whispering without any blush or shame while he thumbs through the wetness at the head of Marty’s cock.

“How much I wanted you to be the one I fell for,” he says, wringing a strangled gasp out of Marty’s lungs on the upstroke. “How much—fuck, Marty, how much I needed you to be mine.”

It’s almost humiliating, how that does him in for good, but then Marty’s coming hard enough in Rust’s hand that he feels like he’s been bent, trying for dear life to swallow down the noise rising in his throat while his hips jerk up once where Rust is still straddling him with his dick out.

Rust’s hand slows until it stops and then they’re both breathing hard against one another in the silence of the living room, one of Marty’s legs hanging off the couch with Rust slumped like deadweight on the other.

He’s got one hand still anchored around the back of Marty’s neck and then brings the freed one up between them, gives the smears of translucent white striped over his skin a sleepy, fleeting look and then licks over the juncture between his finger and thumb, tasting Marty there with the tip of his tongue.

“Oh fuck, come here,” Marty hisses, ten miles past wrecked and still shuddering, and gets such a tight fistful of Rust’s shirt that the top buttons come loose when he yanks him back in for a kiss.

Their mouths crash together in a clatter of teeth and tongue and Marty can taste himself there on Rust’s lips, pushes past them and feels the hum of a moan in the other man’s body when he gets a handful of Rust’s shirt and pulls down, just far enough to catch sight of an amber glow bleeding out between them.

Marty pulls back fast, watching the golden warmth spread and thrum where the heel of his hand is pressed against the center of Rust’s chest. “Hey,” he says, swallowing tight. “That—that thing’s happening again.”

Rust looks down and reaches up to pull the rest of the buttons on his flannel loose. He takes Marty’s hand between his and uncurls his fingers free from a fist, pressing the flat of his palm over the white of his undershirt and the light radiating out beneath it.

“Guess I do it for you,” he says, smiling soft as he leans closer to nose into the crook of Marty’s neck, not paying any mind to the way Marty bows his head and flushes so hard he can hardly see straight.

They get themselves tucked away and clean up best they can for the moment, not doing much more than sitting there breathing while the air conditioner clicks on and starts whirring down the hall. Marty props back against the arm of sofa and lets Rust wedge himself down in between his side and the cushions until he’s halfway draped over him, breath tickling soft below his ear.

Time drifts for a little while and Marty doesn’t think. At least not about anything but how warm he feels here, how easy and how far from wrong all of it’s turned out to be. He’s got a full-grown man curled against him like a sleep-warm puppy burning gold and it’s not so bad, now that he’s come to full brush with the feeling. Not so bad at all.

“I ain’t ever gonna need a nightlight again so long as I keep you fed and happy, huh?” he says, reaching around to palm the dip in Rust’s side. A little laugh rasps and whispers up through him by way of reply, and then Marty opens his eyes and looks out through the back window and finally sees the sky.

“Rust,” he croaks, trying to sit up. “Look.”

Rust lifts his head and turns to glance over his shoulder, lips parting when he catches sight of the view outside. He’s peeling himself away from Marty and up off the couch in an instant, padding across the carpet to stand in front of the sliding glass door. Marty follows as fast as he can and they both look up into the blue-black night, now ablaze with orbs of light streaking like streamers across the sky.

“What the hell is that?” he asks, turning to watch the brightness glass over Rust’s eyes, filling up the blue with stripes of gold and pink that swirl there like curls of smoke. “Is it—are more of them falling?”

“They’re not falling,” Rust says, pushing the sliding glass door open and disappearing into the dark, his voice trailing back over his shoulder like an echo. “Come out here with me.”

Out from under the porch awning and standing in the yard, the sky looks like a flurry of embers blowing along a blackened wind, lit up like no kind of firework show or meteor shower Marty’s ever seen. The stars still hang in their usual spots thrown slapdash like diamonds across the horizon, but they look bigger and brighter, humming and alive.

Rust drops down to sprawl in the yard along the edge of the garden plot and takes Marty with him, both lying back in the still-warm grass, pressed together in a long seam from hip to shoulder.

“I could hear the others whispering, you know, when you were born,” Rust says, watching the sky shimmer and glow. “I remember the night.”

“When I was— _me?_ ” Marty asks, too stricken under the spell of something dreamlike to push the awe out of his voice. “What’d they say?”

“They said, ‘that’s gonna be the world’s biggest prick right there,’” Rust says, not trying to hide the smile in his voice when his hand finds Marty’s down by their sides and curls around it. “And I’ll be damned if they weren’t right.”

“Hush up,” Marty says, nudging Rust in the side and laughing under his breath. “They did not.”

“Naw, but I guess it’s how I figured I always knew, somehow.”

“Knew what?”

“That I’d fall for you,” Rust says, plain as blue-clear day, pressing his thumb into the heart of Marty’s palm. “Right here.”

“Jesus,” Marty says, far from lightheaded, though he can feel something gather up like a hot welt in the back of his throat. “Rust—”

“I’d watch you, sometimes,” Rust says. “Got some shit filed away under the Greatest Hits of Martin Hart.”

Marty blinks and shakes his head, lost for anything to do but pull Rust closer against him. “Fifty three years is a long time to be doing something like that.”

Rust makes a small noise in the back of his throat between a laugh and a snort. “Fifty three years ain’t nothing compared to how long I’ve been hanging around,” he says. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re just now gettin started.”

“I remember the time you pulled the hot iron down on your hand when you were little,” he continues, and then reaches without looking to press two fingers along the side of Marty’s right hand where a mottled scar has long since turned white and faded. “And the morning you were outside playing at your grandma’s house and found the baby bird under the gardenia bush, and brushed all the ants off it so it’d stop crying.”

“It died, later that afternoon,” Marty whispers, closing his eyes against the stars. “It was too sick.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rust tells him, turning his face around to press his lips against Marty’s jaw. “You tried—and I’ve always known, despite it all, that you had kind hands. Kinder than you’ve ever given yourself credit for, maybe.”

The sky keeps blazing with sparks of something like fire-lit amber and Marty has gone quiet, though he reopens his eyes when Rust clears his throat and slides a hand up to rest somewhere over his heart.

“There’s something I need to share with you,” he says, quiet. “A gift.”

“You don’t have to give me nothing, Rust,” Marty tells him. “Not a damn thing.”

“I do,” Rust insists, sitting up slowly to look down at him, silhouetted by the burning night. “Because I want to. And it’s yours, if you’ll have it. I—I can’t give it to anybody else.”

“What do you mean?” Marty asks, watching Rust maneuver around until he’s sitting cross-legged at Marty’s side, one knee pressed against the swell of his rib cage. And again, watching him there, glowing like something warm and beautiful in the starlight, Marty begins to remember how impossibly small he is in throw of Rust’s shadow.

“If I hadn’t found you like this, after I’d fallen, I’d have withered and burnt down to nothing,” Rust says, fingers skimming through the grass. “So I fell here—for you, Marty. And now you get to take the wish.”

Marty blinks at him and then sits up, slow, slow, back creaking all the way. “A wish?” he says, letting the seam between his brows tighten. “You’re fucking joking.”

“All the stories they tell ain’t total bullshit,” Rust says, finding Marty’s eyes and holding them there. “You’re supposed to wish on a falling star.”

“Anything I want?” Marty asks, suddenly feeling bashful, out here under the entire fucking sky lit up for them. “I reckon that’s a pretty steep order to fill on short notice.”

“Only one,” Rust says, laughing a little breathlessly, like he can’t quite believe it himself. “So you’d better make it a fucking good one.”

Any blush that might’ve been burning in his cheeks dies away quick and is replaced by something else, a different kind of burn—somewhere up underneath the cradle box of his chest where it drops and rings hollow in the pit of his stomach, clenching there tight like a pale fist.

And that’s a familiar feeling, maybe, Marty thinks. He knows it and has knocked elbows with it a time or two before in the past. Enough to know the hard pull of fear.

“You said anything I want?” he repeats, and Rust is still watching him and nodding gently, like he’s already reconciled to whatever Marty asks, like there’s no room left in the air between them to even question it.

“Well,” Marty says, because maybe he never was too good at being direct straight out of the gate. “What would you say if I—if I asked you something? Something personal.”

Rust’s face is near him again, bowing in close enough to feel the warmth of his words. “Make the wish, Marty,” he says.

Marty bites into his lip and sighs, and he can’t quite look at Rust—can’t quite look at him, but in that moment he knows what he wants.

“I don’t want you to leave again,” he says. “Never, Rust. Not—fucking ever.”

And when Rust laughs Marty’s not expecting it—the sound beautiful and old and new and ragtag, something that makes him feel all too aware of every inch of skin on his body, every blade of grass underneath them, every place where Rust’s body is pressed against his.

“Marty,” Rust says, leaning in close to press his lips against the corner of the other man’s mouth, reaching up to cup the side of his face. “I can’t give you something that’s already happened.”

Their mouths brush back together, soft and easy, before it’s broken by the smile spreading wide across Marty’s face. “Then I’ll save it,” he says, getting his hands up under the hem of Rust’s shirt, and he wants to do everything he can to the end of the earth and back to never let that gold glow in his chest ever go out again. “Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

“That’s easy,” Rust tells him. “I want you.”

“Well,” Marty says, half-hoarse. “You’ve already got that.”

And there’s no real hurry when they pull one another up off the ground and rise together, no rush to get where they’ve always been going all along. So while the rest of Louisiana trails outside to tip their heads back and marvel at the stars, Marty takes his by the hand and guides him back toward the house.  
  
  


★ ★ ★  
  


Rust falls backwards into bed and Marty slides in after him, crowding up between his legs to get two hands under the hem of a white undershirt, working it over his head to ball up and toss somewhere across the room. The old bedside lamp burns low and yellow, just enough to cast their skin in shades of diluted brass, and neither bothers to reach up and turn it off.

The rest of his clothes come off like a dream and part of Marty thinks it shouldn’t have been so easy, working a pair of jeans over Rust’s hips and skimming the sides of his thighs to get him to raise up enough to pull them off—but it happens freely without any words passed between them, and when Rust is spread out flushed and naked in the sheets he draws in a sighing breath and looks up at Marty with his eyes burning soft and says, “I wanna see all of you, too.”

Marty’s hands fumble and falter a little under Rust’s gaze, and damn if he’s ever undressed for another man in his life, but a familiar set of hands help work his shirt off his shoulders and when he’s finally stripped down to nothing Rust is on him in an instant, kissing the pink-tinged taste of shyness right out of his mouth.

“Shame I ain’t as young as I used to be,” Marty half-laughs, shivering when Rust touches the back of one knee, a thin sliver of an old appendectomy scar below his navel, the soft jut of bone under skin at his hip and collar.

“You’re perfect just like you are,” Rust says, and Marty thinks he might wither on the spot, crumple into ash and scatter on a dead wind, but then Rust is kissing slow up his side and along his chest, one hand sliding easy over Marty’s stomach. “Wouldn’t want you any other way.”

They curve into one another and let their mouths and hands roam free, and Rust touches like he’s healing and kisses like he breathes, mapping out Marty like he’s a whole new world full of a landmarks, picking and following points on his body like the hinges of another constellation hanging in the sky.

His hand finds Marty’s cock again and cups him there, middle finger sliding lower and swiping up in a little motion that’s got Marty cussing a blue streak, jamming a knee up between Rust’s thighs and slotting their hips together good and tight. The friction is hot and sweet and Rust’s lips part when they touch, breath gasping soft in Marty’s ear when he feels the other man’s cock pressing hot and hard into his groin.

“Marty,” he rasps, bucking and rolling his hips when Marty’s mouth finds the little dip at the base of his throat. “Marty, I—I need you.”

“I’m right here,” Marty says, one hand following the ridge of Rust’s spine down to the curve of his lower back. “You got me.”

“N—no,” Rust says, sounding broken and feverish when the last two fingers on Marty’s hand skim over the cleft of his ass. “Need you inside me.”

“Oh _fuck,_ ” Marty groans, growling it out against the underside of Rust’s jaw while he gets a handful of that satin skin and tight muscle and squeezes. “You gotta tell me how you want it—gonna have to tell me what you need.”

“Don’t care how you do it, Marty,” Rust says, real quiet, before his voice drops to something that burns straight through Marty like a bullet. “Just so long as you make love to me.”

“Jesus,” Marty rasps, bowing over to find Rust’s mouth and pressing a kiss there, once and again. “Whatever you want, baby—I’m gonna take care of you.”

Marty thanks God for small graces and fumbles a familiar blue bottle out the bedside drawer, comes back to find Rust with question lit up in his eyes. “We really need that?” he asks, watching Marty slide up alongside him again to uncap the lid.

“We’re gonna,” Marty says, swallowing a little thickly, slicking his fingers up and reaching down between Rust’s thighs, stalling out there before he moves any further. “I ain’t ever done this kinda thing before with another—with a man. But it’ll make it easier for you, so—you can feel good, y’know.”

“Well c’mon then,” Rust says, and then makes a sharp little noise in his chest when Marty pushes the first finger in, brows knitting together and pulling tight.

“Oh,” he gasps, and Marty is a little lightheaded but laughs soft against Rust’s mouth, working a few more moments before he finally pushes the second finger in to join the first.

Rust starts to writhe and squirm under his touch the longer they go, breathing growing more shallow with every passing moment, leaking against his own stomach and pushing back hard against Marty’s hand.

“Fuck, _fuck,_ ” he keeps hissing, the word something both sacred and profane when it rolls off Rust’s tongue, and Marty’s aching down deep for him by the time the third finger is worked in past the tight ring of muscle there, so hard it’s starting to hurt.

“Rust,” he says. “Rust, I need to, I _gotta—_ ”

“Right now,” Rust says, tremors sliding down through his thighs while one hand curls in the sheets, the other grasping weakly at Marty. “Come on, Marty, come on, oh fuck, please.”

Marty pulls his hand free and wipes it clean best he can, sits up and looks down at Rust stretched beneath him against the pillows, chest rising and falling with his pupils blown wide. They watch one another for a moment and then Marty is taking his own cock in hand, easing down slow to settle closer between the spread of the other man’s legs, shuddering a little when the tip of Rust’s tongue darts out to swipe along his bottom lip.

“Here,” he says, reaching down with his free hand to brace it up under Rust’s hips. “Just relax, just breathe, I’m gonna—I’m gonna make it real good for you, hold on.”

Rust raises one leg like he’s running on instinct and Marty hooks an arm up under it, moves in close and lines up. He bites down against his bottom lip for a moment and then watches Rust’s face when he finally takes himself in hand and pushes forward into him.

There’s a shallow gasp of Marty’s name whispered through the quiet room and Rust’s neck arches back as his mouth drops open, eyes dripping shut and clenching tight. Marty exhales long and ragged, slides in a little further—slow, so fucking slow—and bows down over Rust until he can feel his breath soft against one cheek, braces himself and starts to move.

Rust’s fingers immediately find purchase around Marty’s shoulders and dig in tight. His stomach tenses up and Marty keeps it slow even though he thinks it might kill him, reaches up to touch the side of Rust’s face until his eyes flutter back open.

“You alright?” he asks and Rust only nods, one hand sliding up to palm the back of Marty’s neck. He draws his other leg up and then locks his ankles behind Marty’s ass, pulling him deeper, and when Marty pulls out a little and slides back in to the hilt Rust jerks hard against him and makes a sound like he’s halfway down the road to dying.

“Marty,” he whispers, frayed around the edges, holding him close until Marty sinks low enough to move against him, dragging them both down in an easy-rolling tide. He licks into Rust’s mouth and kisses him soft while he rocks into him, making little noises catch and hitch in Rust’s lungs like parched leaves, and when he braces himself up on one elbow and pivots in from a different angle Rust starts bucking his hips up underneath him.

His legs tighten around Marty’s waist and his fingers are pressing like fired brands into his back, breath coming harsher and faster, and it’s only then that Marty looks down and sees the amber warmth pooling into the hollow of Rust’s chest, radiating out weak gold from around his heart.

He starts to move faster and thrusts into Rust deep and heavy despite the sweat starting to slide slick between them now, and he can’t kiss him anymore but he breathes harsh against Rust’s mouth, bowed low over him like he’s knelt at the foot of an altar, devoid of any thought or feeling but something that thrums through him in an electric-hot kind of prayer.

Rust’s hands are burning him now, outright burning so hot it’s like being on fire, but Marty doesn’t stop, can’t stop, only chases his release through Rust and tangles his fingers in the soft curls at the top of his head, feeling desire begin to cramp up and ignite every nerve in his body like a tightened bowstring.

“Marty,” Rust says at last, the name torn free from his throat, and he’s burning up now, glowing like daylight through the shadows. “Marty, oh God, I’m almost, I—you gotta close them, you _can’t—_ ”

“Can’t what?” Marty rasps, letting a hand gently pull his head down against one of Rust’s shoulders.

And then Rust’s voice is coming back, whispering broken in his ear, “Close your eyes.”

So Marty does, and when Rust lights up, the room goes white with him.

The lightbulb in the bedside lamp strains and pops when Rust goes rigid, raking his hands down Marty’s back in what feels like a rush of wildfire, and he doesn’t make a sound when his mouth falls open but the windows still rattle in their frames as he comes, shaking and trembling through bright-imploding death of a different kind.

Marty cries out when Rust tightens around him and it doesn’t take long, only two, three more thrusts and he’s gone, coming with his face buried in the safe darkness between Rust’s neck and shoulder, falling against him as the whiteness begins to recede and licks over their bodies without any pain.

Wet heat has blossomed up between them but Marty can’t move, only lays there breathing hard until he can draw his head up, kissing soft and crooked along the hinge of Rust’s jaw, working toward the corner of his mouth.

“Did you feel that?” Rust whispers, lashes low against his cheeks. His chest is still glowing soft gold with a pulsing warmth, just enough to make out their faces in the dark.

“Baby,” Marty laughs against Rust’s neck, “I don’t think there’s a house on the block that didn’t feel that shit.”

“Don’t mean it like that,” Rust tells him softly, soothing his fingertips over the places on Marty’s skin where his hands had left blisters, drawing up chills that ripple across his back. “Did you feel—when it happened?”

“When what happened?” Marty asks, drawing up a little to look at Rust, sliding a hand down the length of his side. Rust’s eyes are sleepy but still glow like the kind of diamond-bright blue that Marty’s only ever been able to pick out of the sky.

“The moment,” he says without any bluster or shame, smiling soft and easy, “when you became mine.”

And God help him, all Marty can do is kiss him, pull out and away as easy as he can manage, drawing Rust close to him in the gold-toned dark. “You’re the only one I’m gonna let get away with saying a thing like that,” he says, pressing the words against Rust’s hair. “Dunno what it was, but I sure as hell felt something, Lone Star.”

Rust smiles at that and draws one of Marty’s hands up between them, pressing his lips against the pulse threading soft through his wrist.

“What’re you doing?” Marty asks gently, watching him.

“This here’s my favorite,” Rust says, kissing the branch of veins spreading out like a tiny tributary there.

“Oh yeah?” Marty snorts. “That taste like peaches too?”

“Naw,” Rust says, dropping Marty’s hand to turn against him, finding his mouth instead. “I reckon it tastes like home.”

  
  
  


 ☾ ★ ☾ ★ ☾ ★ ☾   
  
★ ★ ★  
  
 ☾ ★ ☾ ★ ☾ ★ ☾ 

   
  


The garden blooms big and beautiful with the rise and fall of every spring and summer and won’t quite shrivel or turn brown even at the height of frost-bitten Louisiana winter—something the neighbors might notice, time and again as the years slip by, but which nobody ever finds strange enough to question.

Marty pulls a few loose strings and helps Rust get that social security card, which has a name on it that nobody would find reason to question, either, watching the two of them go about their business, taking late lunches on the weekend down at the fishing camp and working out in the yard. They spray one another with the garden hose when they’re supposed to be watering the flowers, feed birds that always seem to take bread from their hands no matter how wild, and plant a yearling peach tree in the center of that big, sprawling garden plot, which they pull from the plastic pot and tuck into the earth themselves.

Rust learns to drive stick inside the breadth of a single day and won’t settle for anything else, winds up with a red Ford Marty likes to call _a piece-of-shit relic from the Clinton Administration_ and says that’s fine, he’ll wear it into a grease spot on the ground anyways. He smokes because he likes it and sometimes does a magic trick for the kids along the block where he’ll blow into his fist and then pour a shimmering handful of fine glitter into the air—something they’ll always watch with eyes filled to the brim with stars.

Neither one of them seem to get sick, ever, and on the off chance any cuts or bruises or broken bones happen to pop up, they never do tend to last more than a day. The aches and pains in Marty’s back and knees clear up overnight and their friends and neighbors and even Maggie, sometimes, remark on how much younger he looks nowadays, tuned brighter and more vibrant and at-ease, somehow, after all those years of being alone.

Rust still likes to sit out under the stars. He talks to them sometimes, late at night when only they’re there to listen, and when he disappears one afternoon and comes back home a few hours later with a blue constellation needle-beat over his heart and a story about the birth of the sky, Marty only smiles and traces over the lines with his fingertips, lays back with him in the grass and listens.

The years go by and there’s a wish Marty keeps in his pocket that he’ll sometimes reach down and thumb there like an old penny or a well-worn key, something blue and bright that won’t tarnish no matter how much it ages.

“What you got there?” Rust’ll ask him, slanting Marty a look over breakfast while he slathers peach marmalade onto a piece of half-burnt toast.

“Nothin’,” Marty tells him, opening his hands to reveal two empty palms. “Just something I’m saving for a rainy day.”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> If Disney romances could be x-rated, I imagine this story would be right up that alley. I know there was a big ole' helping of sugary sweetness to go around, considering middle-aged rednecks and all, but I hope y'all enjoyed this for what it was. The story was originally meant to mimic a fairytale and I wanted to keep it as romantic and lighthearted as I could manage.
> 
> Neil Gaiman's novel, _Stardust_ , was the preliminary inspiration for this piece but didn't influence too much beyond the fallen star basis. I haven't read the book in seven or eight years and never did see the movie, so most any similarities are probably coincidental at this point.
> 
> Thanks for reading. ❤


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